Comment by Aurornis

The Steam device has a 110W GPU and 30W CPU. The M4 Mac Mini's peak power consumption is less than half of that. Even with the Apple Silicon efficiency, it can't keep up with high power GPUs in graphical loads like gaming.

Mac Mini will throttle itself after sustained full load, especially with the GPU engaged.

A Mac Mini will start throttling well before the end of a 30 minute online gaming match.

A larger volume for better cooling was a good choice for a machine designed to run the CPU and GPU at full load for hours.