Steam Frame teardown reveals one problem with its future repairs

What happened

Gaming Steam Frame teardown reveals one problem with its future repairs In an otherwise repairable device, the cooling fan is hard to reach. In an otherwise repairable device, the cooling fan is hard to reach.

11, 2026 2:30 pm EST Valve Add Engadget on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Although the Steam Frame is too expensive and late to the party to bring the masses into VR, it does a lot of things right. But iFixit's teardown flagged one component that isn't easy enough to reach: the cooling fan.

That fan is buried deep inside the headset. To get to it, you have to snake past the optical assemblies, making your way through a dense jungle of thermal hardware, cables and other components.

While the fan and heat pipe are separate (a good thing), getting there in the first place is more of a problem. After all, fans accumulate dust, and they eventually wear out.

Burying one this deep makes the Steam Frame a harder repair than it otherwise might have been. A blemish on an otherwise smooth repair path Valve Fortunately, repairs elsewhere are a much more encouraging story.