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TBF I'd rather it shipped with a single 16gb stick so you can upgrade to 32 than two 8gb that you could only upgrade by replacing both
TL;DW?
Gamers Nexus is great but I don't always have an hour+ for their videos 😐
TLDR: There’s a trade off when dealing with a ram shortage but this is a bit of a reach. Valve ain’t twirling a mustache…
Basically, don’t attribute motivation for just dealing with the environment.
Ya you gotta be dedicated lol. This one, however, was like 23 minutes or so.
Still too long for what could have been 2 paragraphs and a bar graph.
Yup but my point is its not one of the typical 1 hour long ones.
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.
Parts of the video make it sound like gn thinks valve is doing this maliciously
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.
GN usually offers the tl;dw in the first minute, as in this case.
It was like the first 25 seconds, haha. Hats off to them.
Really loved Gamers Nexus’ written content and it’s a bit of a bummer that it’s gone deeper and deeper into the video format :/
They gotta make money.
Remember when people did this kind of thing because they were genuinely interested and wanted to share their interests with the rest of the world?
Passion doesn't pay the bills unfortunately. I also reject the assertion that getting paid better for something or changing your reporting approach means that you can no longer be "genuinely interested".
Monetizing of the online video "industry" directly lead to this kinda of video where a 2 minute talking point is padded out to more than 20 minutes. A passionate person would be trying to get the point across for their viewers not getting the 5th mid-roll ad in.
Watch videos by Mike Harrison (Mike's Electric Stuff) or Ben Krasnow (Applied Science), while they do occasionally run long, the videos are so dense that you can't skip 75% and still know what's going on.
Gamer's Nexus sums up their video in the first 60 seconds, typically, for people exactly like you who don't want to watch 20 minutes videos.
Some of us, on the other hand, like the content and watch all 20 minutes. You don't get to gatekeep what a passionate person would do.
I wonder how much for another 16gb stick...
It's probably cheaper just to buy a second steam machine for the second stick of memory.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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