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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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Valve is shipping the steam machine with a single stick of 16gb of RAM, what they were able to procure. This hampers performance. Parts of the video make it sound like gn thinks valve is doing this maliciously, despite gn also saying this is what valve was able to get all they could ship more machines.
At no point in the video does Steve suggest it was malicious
Clickbait headline
It's not even the video title that's clickbait. It's OP editorializing
There's an interview with two Valve employees (maybe by Tested? I forget) where they were very clear that this is what RAM they were able to purchase. Otherwise they would simply have to produce far fewer Steam Machines overall. Not very good choices to have when releasing a product...
EDIT: Nope I guess it was n fact Steve from GN doing that interview, clips are in this video, and Valve corrected the statement to say that all machines are shipping with a single 16 GB RAM stick. Damn.
Edit: I was going off the previous interview and had not yet watched video in OP. There's been a correction to state all machines have one stick. My bad!
Original comment below
The malicious part, imho, is that some machines have two sticks and some machines have one. Which will you get? Who knows! So you could pay the same amount as another customer, but get a worse machine.
Feel like you'd be lucky to get single stick because the performance difference is marginal and you have the opportunity to upgrade it to 32GB by buying just 1 16GB stick.
My understanding is that DDR5 is very sensitive to matched pairs of modules. I don't think you can rely on individually purchased sticks working together. Not to say that it can't work, but it might be a crapshoot.
I wonder how long it will be until Steam Machine owners start selling their original sticks to other Steam Machine owners, and then buying a matched pair for themselves.