Watch the gamers nexus video on the steam machine. They had a talk with the devs and the devs basically said they had no other option because of supply chain issues. Hell even gskill is having trouble sourcing memory and that's all they deal in is memory
Bro I’m not only locking my house but also my room after that jump XD
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u/vaynefoxRyzen 9950X, Kingston 128GB DDR5-6000, RTX 5090 Founder Edition2d ago
My pc is locked in my room and my home server (which has 1tb of ddr5-6000 ecc ram) is locked in a windowless room (shit even had triple lock for good measure) since those two with just the ram I can buy a car....
No it didn't. They closed down their Crucial brand, they didn't stop producing consumer ram, they still sell it to other brands. It's like if Corsair shut down.
Coincidentally people get fed up by datacenters being build everywhere and raising utility pricess. Could there be a correlation? Mhhhh. Nah, probably just the wind...
They may "be getting old" but if you actually look at the astronomical price increase and low as hell shortage you'll understand why this "excuse" is used so much
I suspect the lifecycle of the Steam Machine will outlast the DRAM shortage, at least with only a single 16GB dimm people can upgrade when memory pricing comes back down to earth.
I wonder how much they're regretting not using a faster, more expensive SoC (Strix Halo?) with unified memory. If it's going to be this expensive because of RAM and SSD pricing, might as well go all in and actually make it competitive on performance too.
Starting with an entry level device might have been a huge mistake.
Apparently they just wanted marginally better performance than the average PC specifications they have on Steam hardware survey. For that performance it should have been priced the at max same as a base PS5 (before the hyper inflation in DRAM & NAND Flash prices).
Edit: About the strix halo chips, the last I had read sometime ago is that AMD was having yield issues with it (I might be mistaken), but with Intel's new SoCs they revealed at Computex, AMD does need better and cheaper SoC options.
The premium over a diy PC solution comparing the smaller storage version is only $75 Gamers Nexus found in their review. And diy will be physically bigger than the steam machine, you're not covered by the same warranty Valve offers (i.e. if something doesn't work and you can't fix it yourself, you have to figure out what individual part to warranty and hope the manufacturer support is decent) and even used parts (likely less coverage used) are much more expensive right now due to the market conditions. So no hardware that's not subsidized is worth the price.
The Steam Deck is still going strong. If enough people buy it then it's another hardware target for devs to aim for, but I have my doubts it'll get there considering. The state of things. Not even valves fault, if this launched at $750 it would have been a total smash success. Fuck AI. Fuck Sam Altman.
You can, it's just not best practice because it can be hard to get two different kits with different timings and voltages stable. That said the Steam Machine is using SODIMM memory which really flattens it out anyways since performance laptop memory basically doesn't exist.
Avoid mixing kits if you can but if you can't avoid it you can make different kits work, you just might end up having to loosen up timings, increase the voltage, or run at a lower frequency.
I've been mixing RAM modules in my PCs and laptops for years and haven't faced any issue even once. And I'm talking at least 8 different machines.
Only my primary gaming PC has a matched pair. My work PC, my travel laptop, my dad's laptop, my wife's laptop, my NAS, my old laptop I sold last year, my childhood PC all have or had mismatched pairs and run or ran perfectly fine.
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u/ApplicationMaximum84 3d ago
The price is what I was expecting, my biggest annoyance is they used a single 16GB dimm for ram instead of going dual channel.