Hacker News Reader

Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

The steam machine has upgradable storage and RAM, both being their respective commodity connections (m.2 & sodimm respectively). There's even 1 sodimm slot free from the factory if you want to immediately plunk in a 2nd 16gb stick.

Those two are realistically the only upgrades someone buying a prebuilt instead of DIY is going to entertain doing regardless.

But that's all besides the point, which it's simply that clearly the steam machine is priced fairly for the hardware it contains in the current economic market. Whether or not you personally would prefer a prebuilt or to DIY is entirely irrelevant

View on HN

Note that some machines will have two 8GB sticks, others just one 16GB stick. This is mentioned in the Gamers Nexus interview with some Valve employees, who were talking about the difficulty of finding RAM at any price. They had intended them all to be two sticks, but some will come with one because that's all they could source.

Would have been nice from Valve to be transparent about that. Maybe a little warning that your particular batch performs a little less than others.

What sort of difference does dual-channel RAM make? Some people probably want the single 16GB so they can add their own additional stick. Which option is better is not straightforward.

...

https://www.techspot.com/article/3066-single-stick-vs-dual-c... - seems like 5-50% change in FPS! Way more of a factor (on some games) than I thought.

Valve claimed in their internal tests it did not meaningfully change performance, which I'd be inclined to believe. The Steam Machine is likely going to be most often GPU bottle-necked, so the CPU performance regressing by even double digit percentages doesn't necessarily result in any change in gaming performance.

You'll note in that techspot comparison, by contrast, they used the fastest CPU and fastest GPU and then still used medium/low settings to really maximize whatever difference the RAM speed would have. Which is a valid test, but it's not necessarily going to generalize to low-end hardware. Like the CPU being limited to 90fps instead of 120fps doesn't matter when the GPU is struggling to hit 60fps in the first place.

Valve has since clarified that all current units will have a single 16GB stick. It might change in the future, but as of right now everything is the same. I assume that 8GB sticks just kinda don't exist anymore, though.

A GPU defect on the Steam Machine requires a full replacement of the proprietary motherboard. You can’t put a new GPU in or have someone do it for you. And when GTA VI comes out there is no upgrade path possible to make the Steam Machine perform enough.

> A GPU defect on the Steam Machine requires a full replacement of the proprietary motherboard. You can’t put a new GPU in or have someone do it for you.

Of course you can have someone put in a new one for you, it's called an "RMA"? A GPU defect is going to show up well within the warranty period. It's things like fans that will fail over time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com