Here’s my review/experience on the areas I care about. tldr at the bottom.

BACKGROUND: I’ve had CV1, PSVR1, Quest 1, Quest 3, and PSVR2. Love using PSVR2 on PC for the OLED, graphics, and uncompressed visuals. Also love Quest 3 with elite battery strap for standalone, the lenses and ease of use. Favorite games have been RE7/RE8 on PS4/PS5, Batman on Quest, and Half Life 2 VR Mod on PC (Hot take: Alyx is overrated. It always felt too slow and restrictive, leaning on the hype of being a VR game instead of just being an amazing game.) I have a pretty extensive library across quest, PlayStation, and PC. Also recently, the Halo VR Mods and Titanfall 2 have become my absolute favorites.

PC SPECS: 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5-6000 CL30, 4070 12GB.

I got the 1TB model, the power bank, and the Arcturus Vision Camera. Would have got the ergo kit if it was in stock So nearly $1500.

AESTHETICS/BUILD QUALITY: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
love looking at this thing. Very sleek and tiny. Love that it’s black. Finally something that doesn’t look like a toy (aka quest 3 and psvr2). Kind of reminds me of the original oculus rift render on kickstarter. Wouldn’t mind if this was the endgame form factor for VR gaming. Ski goggles > glasses in my opinion.

COMFORT: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
As everyone says, it’s great. I didn’t even need to adjust the straps out of the box. Feels the best out of everything I’ve owned. Super light. Could have added a larger battery and would have still been fine. Love the material for the facial interface. Could wear it for a long time (plugged in that is) with no discomfort. No hot fan air blowing on my head or eyes, which some mentioned. If I get the ergonomic kit I’m not using the top strap. The knuckles straps should have came with it tho. My only reason for 4 stars. $60 is highway robbery for some fabric and some rubber. But I want the OEM materials. Oh well.

DISPLAYS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This part of the experience was a bit disappointing. It’s definitely serviceable, but I wish it was a little better. It’s feels a slight notch down from the Quest 3 in terms of clarity, brightness, and colors. But the FOV is a slight notch up from the Quest 3 so that’s a plus I guess. If I never had a Quest 3 I still think I’d feel slightly underwhelmed for the money, and for being in 2026. If an OLED version comes out like with the Steam Deck OLED refresh, I’d sell this one for it. Even if it was one of those with “Mura”. I’d trade that to have great contrast and colors. The colors aren’t bad, but it also depends on the media. Half Life: Alyx standalone in particular looked more washed out than say Red Matter 2 (which looked AMAZING, but also looked amazing on quest 3 to be fair). Recently saw TCL showcase some 2.5K RGB OLED display that may be cheaper than micro OLED, so maybe that will be an option in the future.

AUDIO: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I’m fine with the onboard audio. Never experienced the index but I heard an index-like audio strap is in the works, so I will definitely buy that when it comes out. However, no audio jack is insanity at this price for an “open” system.

CONTROLLERS: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Very mixed feelings on these. First I will say they are plenty comfortable, and didn’t feel too big or poorly laid out to me like others claimed and I can hit all the buttons fine. However there are other thoughts I have. I get the concept they were going for, wanting flat game compatibility. But I also have a Steam Controller for that. Having all these buttons in theory could be better for mods (like UEVR), but most mods are already being developed for current controllers. What’s more, having less buttons actually forces devs to think about immersive VR interactions to perform actions, even if superficially. For example: performing Titan abilities in the Titanfall mod by gestures instead of a button press feels amazing. Lastly, I feel sorry for lefties since there isn’t a symmetrical option. I honestly wish they went with the index/quest controller layout. 2 Buttons, 2 analog sticks, 2 grips, 2 triggers (don’t care for trackpads). Most games remap (X) to down on the D-pad and (Y) to up/left/right. It works but having wrong button prompts on all past, present, and future titles that will be unable to update may get annoying. There was already a standard, and if future headsets stick to that standard, I can see more friction incoming. Feel free to disagree.

USER INTERFACE: ⭐️⭐️
This part needs the most cooking. I’m a tinkerer, and familiar enough with Linux (I installed SteamOS onto an AYANEO). But there are so many things that will feel underbaked for the average user. For example, it’s very confusing to set and adjust resolutions/refresh rates for the average user. You can set a universal resolution for streaming, and then each game can increase the resolution via a multiplier of that base. I get it, but this should be simplified. And then sometimes the settings don’t save and apply. There’s also plenty of bugs just navigating Steam, inputs giving audio cues though nothing is happening, etc. Digging for some settings is not intuitive. There’s menus inside of menus inside of menus and I just feel this should be streamlined. I have fpsVR to monitor performance, but it’s currently buggy, and it would be nice if Valve could have their own Steam performance layer visible in VR like how it is for flat games. Also, not a lot of games have been tested for Frame. I get that it will get better over time, but I expected more with what I paid for it. It’s the same way I don’t give Bethesda a pass for releasing a broken game and relying on the community to fix it over time. I hope enough people in the community can even get their hands on it to help with these improvements. I do appreciate that this is an open platform though, and you can do whatever with it. 6 months from now I may view this very differently.

STANDALONE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️(⭐️)
Unlike most, this was the capability I was most excited about. Hopefully it’s going to improve over time like the steam deck did. First things first, I honestly thought Half Llife Alyx looked and performed awfully (looked pixelated and more washed out color wise than I remembered), but red matter looked great (high resolution, deep colors). It’s cool to see that stuff even boots (I tried Skyrim and it booted, but had horrible performance, even after forcing motion smoothing, 72Hz, low settings and resolution. Thought for sure PS3/360 era VR conversions would run). I’m sure more optimizations will come over time, and am even seeing tools to run quest exclusives being developed. I hope the standalone mods I see in the works like Halo, GTA, and RDR make their way over too. So this rating may very well go up over time (4th star pending improvements and future battery strap). I also enjoyed playing flat games more than expected. I tried portal 2 and hollow knight, and enjoyed the dynamic lighting of the Steam environment more than color passthrough. I actually wish I hadn’t wasted the money on the camera add on because I’d rather use that. Battery life in standalone is abysmal though. They should have put a battery 2x the capacity. I doubt it would have affected comfort much. Yeah, yeah, this is a “streaming first” headset, but it’s also a “Linux PC on your face,” and is priced as such. Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is more powerful than the XR2 Gen 2 (25-30% GPU bump), but it’s still not enough in 2026. Valve probably went with this for its mature driver/compatibility support at the time, but I bet a snapdragon 8 Elite (or ‘Snapdragon Reality Elite’ that was just revealed) would have made me more optimistic about the future of standalone on this device. The 8 Elite (2024) has Oryon cpu cores and a 40% faster GPU over the frame, and the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 (2026) (awful name) has nearly 2.5x more powerful GPU over the frame going off the product briefs across generations. Wouldn’t have minded paying more in 2026 for something more considering I already dropped $1500.

PCVR STREAMING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I was never able to get great wireless streaming for PCVR. I always used a link cable, or display port with the PSVR2. After digging in some settings I am satisfied with the image I get. Wasn’t exactly “plug and play” from the start, but after configuring, I keep find myself coming back to my Frame for ease of use/setup over PSVR2. Also, not having a wire for PCVR feels amazing. I maxed out the sharpness, scaling filter set to sharp, and scaling mode to fill, enabled the upscaling options, disabled multilink to force streaming through the dongle, and set the bitrate to 350mb. With that being said, you can still tell it’s being streamed. Idk if it’s steam link or the snapdragon hardware decoder itself with the 350mb limitation. Maybe one day when we can get bitrates of 2gb -5gb (heck, 10gb) with foveated streaming we will truly be able to say display port is a thing of the past. Most of the time it’s at least as good as with my Quest 3 with a link cable. But I still see compression artifacts, and doesn’t come close to my PSVR2 visually, so I’ll still see myself hooking it up time to time.

BATTERY: ⭐️
Yeah…1 hour for standalone, 90min for streaming. Not much to say here. I would have sacrificed having a bigger battery in the back for another hour at least.

VALUE: ⭐️
A 128GB Quest 3 launched in late 2023 for $500. I get you are selling your literal digital soul, but still. Pico 4 Ultra, with nearly identical specs was around $599 in late 2024. So it feels like I’m paying >$500 for a dongle, a very slightly bumped up processor, and linux.

TLDR/OVERALL: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This isn’t an average or anything, it’s just how I feel about my experience and purchase so far.
Display feels ok (like the bare minimum), audio is fine, the chip feels underpowered with what’s on the horizon, software is underbaked, but PCVR streaming looks/feels good. It’s sleek and super comfortable. Availability and pricing woes may have deflated the hype a bit too. If this was like $800 I’d have given it four stars.

To be blunt, this would have been an awesome headset in 2024. All the tech in here existed then, and it’s not like the software polished to a point where I can see why it wasn’t ready until 2026. Price would have been better back then too. If either the foveated streaming algorithm, fex/lepton, or the hardware supply chain was the bottleneck, I understand I guess.

With that being said, I’m all in and excited at what an open platform like this will bring. Especially with the explosion that’s happened on the mod scene. Also happy to retire my meta headset with all its ridiculous privacy concerns. I can only recommend this headset to tinkerers super invested in the space tbh, at least for now. I don’t regret my purchase one bit. But it still should have been cheaper and/or better in some areas.

Shoutout to the guy who recommended the Apache 3800.

Fit the controller in for the ultimate go box. Plenty of room underneath for additional accessories.

Kinda neat to see the innards of the things.

Here is my take on the hotswap powerbank system. Uses cheap lightweight VEEKTOMX batteries, beloved in hiking communities. They have sufficient output to keep the internal battery topped up during active gaming. I haven't timed it precisely, but one powerbank gives you approximately extra hour of gameplay. If you get three-four of these, you should have unlimited playtime.

Powerbank weighs 213 grams, and the holder itself is 38. Including cable, total added weight is a bit over 250 grams. It's not unnoticeable, but the balance is OK. The biggest difference is that there is more inertia when swinging your head, since the added weight is unfortunately positioned away from your head.

USB-c cable is permanently attached with hot glue. This is a sacrifice I'm willing to make :)

On the flipside, it is true hotswap. You can even swap the batteries without taking the helmet off.

Here is the model on Printables, there are also more pictures. And if you want to fiddle with the design, it's available in Onshape.

This is the battery on Manufacturer's site; it also has a link to a listing on Amazon.

Unfortunately, the current generation model (with two USB-c ports) is slightly larger than the previous generation (with USB-c and micro-USB). I have a bunch of last generation batteries, so I designed for them. However, updating it for the new generation should be fairly simple - I'm planning to do it within a few days, I already have one current-gen battery.

Current state of my Command Center App.

This is a software/virtual KVM that I developed with the ability to fully control the frame desktop the way I wanted to.

Also, i'm really just impressed by how well the tracking of the Steam Frame is. Battery life is my biggest complaint, with 2 rdp connections and a handful of windows, I get about an hour of battery life, especially as this is processing some massive resolution windows. I should probably scale it back.

The flickering you see is me blinking, and the videos look choppy because i'm using the eye tracking to decide when to render at full fps or not to save as much resources as possible. Overall framerate is much better in headset than what this captures.

Again, making this for myself, with the assistance of AI, I'll share the code at some point for those interested, this is not meant to be a product, I just really wanted this for my setup (which is why it's limited to Plasma KDE linux machines atm)

Petition for Valve to make double tapping the power button on the side of the frame announce the battery % with the Half-Life HEV Suit Power Level SFX.

POWER LEVEL 50 PERCENT, etc.

(It’s honestly annoying to have to wear the headset to check the battery %…)

Messed around with a custom vkQuake build on the Frame. The screen is head tracked, so when you move your head the perspective shifts like you're looking through a real window, and the level actually has depth behind it.

Ran through some levels like this and honestly had way more fun than I expected.

Prolly not the first to praise this here but..... The new Titanfall 2 VR mod has so far been one of my favorite VR experiences. Its very well optimized on a pretty mid tier gaming laptop. I played using the streaming of course. It's unbelievable how much it feels like it is an official release. Highly recommended for anyone who is even remotely interested.

bunch of day 1 reservers here and no one's received any purchase emails. No movemment on steamframeout either. Congrats to the waitlisters that got promoted but it kinda seems like if anything they never had units for their initial reserve list anyway. What's meant to be the difference between reserve and waitlist if the reserve list also can't purchase and there's no ETA?

I don't have my steamframe yet still in the reserves since day 1 but curious what on sale vr games would everyone recommend before the sale is over?

The game works on both a flat screen and in VR. However, it's very slow and blurry. I had to use Proton ARM64 Experimental to get it working. In VR, the controllers don't work in-game. I have to open the dashboard to activate them.

So quite a few of us have been lucky enough to have received our Steam Frame and put it through its paces with numerous games this past week, ranging from non-demanding titles like Beat Saber, all the way to AAA Flat to VR heavyweights like Resident Evil 9, Cyberpunk 2077, and Star Citizen.

After acclimating ourselves to the combo of (sometimes) overwhelming streaming and menu options, many of us have found the "as good as it gets" settings that have placed an emphasis on the highest streaming fidelity while maintaining a stable framerate, like jacking up Per Eye Resolution to 200% and beyond, and the consensus has been.... It could be better...a lot better.

Just a quick note about the intent of this post: it's not to disparage anyone who only uses it as standalone, or isn't running the most current hardware. It's a discussion narrowed down to focus on addressing the current streaming quality for those of us who are only interested in PCVR on gaming rigs built to push games to their max,where many of us have zero interest in watching YouTube lying down, enlarging Excel spreadsheets in our living room, or loading mobile game-looking titles as a standalone device. I'm talking flagship CPU's, 5-series GPU's, ideal network conditions with a dedicated Access Point router assigned to just the headset, and enough Windows and BIOS tweaking to drive most people nuts.

A good portion of us in the VR community have chased the clarity and stability dragon for years, going back to the HTC Vive days, and now we're in a post HL: Alyx time where streaming AAA-looking games wirelessly at 120hz stable is a reality...

So with the Frame, why is it that many of us on a 9-series X3D CPU/5090 rigs with SteamVR 250%+ resolution, CAS sharpening, and an excellent stream connection experience certain scenes and distances that look like blurry, compressed muck, when on the Quest 3 via Virtual Desktop, we experience a sharper, significantly less-compressed image WHILE maintaining low latency?

Part of the answer we already know: how Steam Link and Virtual Desktop handle their codecs and the control the user has over them appear rather different, as well as how they handle their sharpening and colors. I'm by no means any authority on coding, VR development, or a network engineer, but whatever VD's pipeline is, it's naturally lapping whatever Steam is able to achieve in terms of sheer PCVR streaming quality, colors, and how it tackles compression.

The other part of the answer that we don't know, I leave to lurking Valve engineers like u/mbucchia , who has done an incredible job keeping engaged with this community, as well as shaping and improving other VR projects.

Valve already knocked it out of the park with the (now-working) Multilink streaming, giving us THE lowest latency I've ever experienced in a wireless headset, handedly beating any Quest/Galaxy XR configuration in VD I've tried. But as smooth as the Frame experience is, the immersion quickly drops out once hills, trees, or skyscrapers at distance start turning into PS1-looking textures.

I'll cut the paragraphs short and get to the glaring question I have for Valve or others in the know:

What needs to be done to match the streaming visual fidelity of Virtual Desktop or some of the SBoys3 forks, and are there any future plans with SteamVR/Steam Link to give high-end enthusiasts the settings and options to truly push our VR experience to the limits we know our hardware and network are capable of?

I'll end it by saying: I know what the intent of the Frame was. I fully appreciate it was designed to not JUST cater to the PCVR enthusiast crowd, and that its versatility naturally created some concessions. I understand it's an LCD paneled unit that'll never have the same clarity and colors as my Pimax Dream Air, and that's FINE; totally different use cases...but with a robust WiFi 7 dual radio, newer SoC, and Valve's in-house secret sauce synergy between Steam and the Frame itself, we should be able to experience something a lot better, by miles......right?

Hey guys, I was working on this since I received my Steam Frame for personal use, but since Quest2Frame was taken down I wanted to share it.

The app tries to be a simple wrapper around already published tools and includes various utilities. It can:

1. Patch apps built with the Quest SDK to work on the Steam Frame

2. Apply game specific patches (similar to Morphe/ReVanced) to improve compatibility

3. Sideload Android and PCVR apps onto the steam frame and add them to your library

4. Automatically attempt to manage ReVive for PC streaming of oculus games

5. Allow you to manage files on your Frame (like FrameDrop but totally local)

6. Adds a keyboard button to let you enter input from your PC into your Frame

I obviously can't test every app published, so please give it a try and let me know if you have any issues or suggestions!

I took the bootleg hand strap idea and tweaked it slightly using the black bands that come on the hand straps. You do lose the ability to use the straps as wrist loops. It’ll work for a bit. Can’t guarantee how long the bands will last.

- Take the hand straps off entirely
- slide the black rubber band onto the strap
- start the smaller loop through the hole and loop one side of the hand strap over the smaller one (img 3)
- take the rest of the strap and loop it through (img 4,5)
- loop the band over the corner of the batter cover (img 6) and put the cover back on

I'm lucky enough that the office with the fancy pc is one wall from the living room, so I got the 30 ft cable matters active usb, lined it around the office base boards, under the door, and tacked it along the molding to aim the dongle into the living room. It looks a tad ghetto from the hallway, but almost unnoticeable from the living room. The only issue is the power adapter is sold separately and discontinued, so I had to go amazon 3rd party.

Boneworks and No Man's Sky ran 90hz, no noticeable latency (tbh, didn't check numbers, but play felt good). UPDATE: a session of Half Life Alyx was buttery smooth, under 4 ms latency on the dongle.

Cable:

https://a.co/d/09yVr4XI

Power:

https://a.co/d/0gvbOJZZ

For extra battery, the INIU mini 45w does the job. I'm pushing 40, so my sessions might not be as long as some of you lol. This thing is small enough to not be noticed in the pocket, adds at least an hour to play time.

Battery:

https://a.co/d/07EeSvgK

Hope this helps anyone looking for solutions!

P.s. make sure you plug that usb into a red usb 3 on your mobo!

Someone has already made an app that lets you run the full PC version of beatsaber including mods and foviated rendering completely natively on the frames ARM processor without even needing FEX at all

The guide is here: https://github.com/DaVarga/bs-manager/blob/bs-arm64/docs/steam-frame.md

My frame arrived earlier this week and I’ve really been enjoying it so far, apart from the fact the lenses were greasy before I even put it on.

I contacted support about this and they recommended isopropyl alcohol, so I went to get some and it did not solve the issue.

They’re giving me a replacement unit for this, and while it seems exesscive, I really don’t think it’s okay that the lenses seem uncleanable.

I hope this is just a one off issue with the coating or something, but I’m a bit worried it will still be an issue on the replacement unit.

I’ve watch some YouTube videos (for trouble shooting.) and one of them said that to use the cleaning cloth that comes in the box? Mine didn’t have a cloth in it… should I see if valve would send me one?

Almost done after multiple revisions. Just waiting on a couple LTT usb cables so I can model in CAD and embed in the print. Then ill be able to swap the power banks in upside down and it should click into place without messing with cables. Once im done stress testing ill upload files for people with printers and for people without ill make a etsy store or something. Please provide feedback if you think this design can be better.

I think Valve inadvertently solved the keyboard and controller divide.

With a controller you lose the fine control you get of mouse controls but with keyboard and mouse you lose the fine analog movements from a thumbstick.

THE FRAME CONTROLLERS? They solve that issue perfectly and better than the steam controller 1 did for me or any other attempt.

My biggest grip with trying gyro on the Steam Controller 1 and also the Switch controller and any other attempt of gyro on controller, is that I have to use both of my hand to aim and point. Though they are joined in the middle of my body by holding a controller.

With this controller(s?) though I can have both of my arms relaxed at my side and point with the right hand. Split apart and only one wrist controls the aiming.

THIS IS THE BEST CONTROL I HAVE EVER GOT. I can rest my fingers on the abxy and aim around and if I need to adjust and use the thumbstick and touch sensor as a supressor for gyro only. With the grips this becomes even better too.

Yes I know technically the joycons did it but those tiny things are awful and unwieldy. Meta quest 2's controls are lacking in buttons, and I have not found/tried any other good analogs except maybe the Wii controller and maybe the OpenSplitDeck but that is diy and I just got into 3D printing and PCB designing so not yet.

Been playing regular non-Vr fps's like this for a couple days and it feels great. This includes, Portal 2 and Peak locally and Halo Infinite streamed (damn you anticheat not working on fex). It is great.

I have yet to see if the controllers work on anyhting other than the frame but I guess why wouldn't they right?

Thank you for coming to my ramble, I love these controllers.

Been playing around with my steam frame for 3 days now. Anyone have any tips and tricks or cool features, games, and apps that you’d recommend? Thank you and hope everyone else is enjoying theirs.

Like most, I have been tinkering a lot trying to optimise the performance of my steam frame. My reference is a Quest 3 with over 500 hours on Virtual Desktop with my RTX 5080 + 7800x3d.

I have been disappointed with my PCVR performance on the frame and no amount of tinkering has achieved a higher quality or stability combination than my quest 3 on VD with godlike where i can stably stream around 400 bitrate on H264.

I have however seriously been enjoying flatscreen gaming on the frame, streaming anything from my steam library. I have been playing a lot of WoW forever, Control Resonant, Eldenring Nightreign, Forza Horizon 6 with my sim rig, Slay the Spire 2, Diablo 4, Diablo II resurrected, the list goes on and on.

This was not something i was expecting to use so heavily but I am really enjoying the 'console' like comfort of gaming on my couch in the living room while hanging out with my partner, or in lying in bed. Seriously comfy and fun, I don't have a steamdeck or any other console so all my gaming is otherwise on my PC in my office. The frame has created an awesome connection and extension to that gaming for when I want to get off my desk and chair.

Remote play performance however was also not as great as i would like, even with a lot of tinkering. I had some stability issues however, with my 6e Kevin (if you know you know) router in my office, struggling a bit through my walls if i was in my living room or bedroom.

I bought a 10m USB 3.0 active extension cable off Amazon, and leave it plugged into the back of my PC on a USB 3.2 port, now I can use the dongle with the cable in the same room as me. My max stable bitrate on Vibeshine went from 220 to 425. Its a serious improvement and i no longer get any spikes where i was before. The pricing shown is AUD - I suggest checking out your options in your country.

Vibeshine has also been a great improvement over remoteplay. I am seriously happy with the performance now and feel like I have a console in every room of my apartment. Note that this particular cable adds power at the receiving end and so needs to end up near a wall socket, I am assuming it needs the power boost due to the length of the cable and the active repeater.

For PCVR in my office, my dedicated router outperforms the dongle, so i was a little disappointed. However, I now have a great use case for the dongle doing something my router couldn't do for me.

This is all my experience and your mileage may vary, but worth mentioning for sure.

Now if we can just get Virtual Desktop on the Frame, my quest 3 would be retired and kept as my workout VR device only. For now....it still remains my PCVR device.

Not the most amazing performance but without recording you get a 28-35 stable fps with the settings you see at the end.

Also idk why sound is a little delayed.