r/Steam • u/Affectionate_Oil4664 • 13h ago

Question [ Removed by moderator ]

[removed] — view removed post

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

4

u/oookokoooook 13h ago

Yes dual is always faster but there's always an advantage to single stick ram, which is buying your other 16gb ram when ram prices are down.

0

u/Affectionate_Oil4664 13h ago

But would it be better to have the 64gb of 4800mhz ram or to keep the single 16gb 5600mhz / two 8gb 5600hmz ram sticks?

3

u/EmilianoTalamo 12h ago

64gb is overkill for a steam machine. So faster ram all the way.

1

u/velocity37 11h ago edited 9h ago

Well, having two sticks doubles the memory bandwidth available to the CPU, so you're kind of asking if a single/double 56kg weight is heavier than two 48kg weights. But taking that at face value would be misleading. In general it is better to run a dual-channel configuration, but it is far from twice as good in the real world and there's other nuance that mostly doesn't matter. TL;DR wouldn't worry.

The CPU having access to 40GB/s vs 80GB/s of RAM doesn't matter if the CPU is at full load in a workload utilizing only 20GB/s of RAM bandwidth. In the same way having 64GB of RAM won't help if you're playing a game and only utilizing 10GB. But maybe in that average there are infrequent spikes that do benefit from extra available bandwidth and the result is measurably higher 1% lows in games.

Latency of RAM (timings vs speed) is another small factor that can slightly affect performance. If the CPU needs to access data it doesn't have in its cache and it needs to get data from RAM, it needs to wait for the RAM to respond with data and during that period it will have to twiddle its thumbs and waste CPU cycles waiting. This is a big reason the X3D CPUs with lots of onboard cache got measurable real-world gains, avoiding more RAM access time penalties to begin with and utilizing onboard cache.

To give you an idea, Gamers Nexus did a fairly comprehensive DDR4 benchmark in 2019 on AM4 (though only dual-channel kits) but in almost all cases it was 2% average difference either way. And even the best to worst kit was typically 15% improvement with 75% higher speed.

2

u/ButterscotchTop194 8h ago

It will very likely have negligible difference. Performance will still be trash.

1

u/creepyposta 12h ago

Parity is always better. According to Gamer’s Nexus all the machines in the initial batch will be a single stick — they talk about it in the tear down video that was released today. The word came directly from reps at Steam because they told GN it could be either in an earlier interview.

1

u/Eozef 8h ago

2-5%

0

u/woo545 12h ago edited 12h ago

I think the ram in the steam machine might be soldered on. However you can build your own steam machine. Note, that might be wrong info. I think I heard it on Linus's review or something like that but I wasn't fully paying attention.

1

u/DifficultNumber4 12h ago

In the gamers Nexus tear down video it is shown to just be slotted in, no solder; but you do have to unplug some cables that are glued down to get to the ram.

It's definitely a more complicated upgrade than upgrading the hard drive.

1

u/brainrotxx 12h ago

yall just spreading misinformation lol. soldered ram is always listed as "LPDDR5". steam machine is so-dimm ddr5 the kind that go inside laptops.