so now that I have that set up, it's a great, quiet, console-like experience
but I did have to do manual setup to get it like that. meanwhile the Steam Machine is a cool, quiet, console-like experience out of the box, and with only Valve you'd have to go through for support needs vs the mashup of companies for w/e parts you picked for a DIY build
this was a random ramble about why the Steam Machine is appealing
i'd been using LACT on my console PC to lower the power cap of my GPU, mostly for noise but lower power draw is nice anyway (ends up being roughly 70% of the power draw for 80% of the performance and _way_ quieter)
the LACT flatpak randomly stopped working today, and even when it did work I had to keep opening LACT and re-applying the cap between reboots anyway, so, I finally just set up a script + systemd unit to auto-apply the power cap instead
