Some Steam Machines Set For Downgrade, Random Chance You May Be Unlucky

With Valve now set to release the Steam Machine later this month, the lucky few who managed to snag a unit may experience a pretty big downgrade.

As we’ve reported on many times this year, the ongoing global RAM shortages have caused prices of computer hardware to skyrocket beyond the norm.

This has led to tech companies increasing the prices of their hardware to simply meet the cost that it takes to manufacture these products. As RAM prices keep going up, so does the hardware that contains it.

This has led to a lot of negative reactions surrounding the Steam Machine’s release pricing, which begins at $1,049 for the cheapest model.

Because RAM is also quite hard to come by at the moment, it means that Valve has had to make some compromises to ensure the memory inside Steam Machines is able to hit the benchmarks Valve laid out last November.

As Gamers Nexus outlines in their review of the Steam Machine, “RAM is the biggest problem. Not only is it limited to 16 GB of DDR5 5600, but Valve broke news to us that it would be shipping Steam machines with either a single 16 GB stick or two 8 GB sticks.”

Read More: Steam Offers Free Games As Apology For Hardware Delay, You Could Be Eligible

Steam Machine's RAM Configuration May Cause Problems For You Later On

Whether you get a Steam Machine with one 16 GB stick or two 8 GB sticks appears to be completely random, which may cause issues for some users down the road.

The reason why this may be a downgrade is because 2x8 GB uses a dual channel system, whereas 1x16 GB will be a single channel. Therefore, using two sticks of RAM tends to be a little faster for some tasks as opposed to using a single one.

This can mean losing up to 20% performance for tasks which are bottlenecked by memory, which is a small difference in gaming but has a larger effect for desktop apps.

“It was quite literally impossible to buy 8GB [sticks], at least at the quantities we're looking to buy mostly because everybody wants higher storage, and that's more profitable, so all the capacity shifted to that,” Valve’s Yazan Aldehayyat told Digital Foundry regarding this.

The upside of this is that for Steam Machines using only 1x16 GB, there’ll be room to add an additional stick of 16 GB of RAM at a later date to meet a total of 32 GB.

This won’t make much of a difference for games that meet a CPU or GPU bottleneck, but should mean the desktop runs more efficiently.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in picking up a Steam Machine but are unlucky with the reservation queue, Valve has provided you with a way to build your own thanks to the latest release of SteamOS.