8 GB of VRAM and 16 GB of RAM … those are the specs of my almost 15 years old legacy machine. I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.

Which might just be 70% of gaming rigs. Steam would know best.

Steam would know best.

indeed!

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

(store.steampowered.com)

seems like 16 GB ram and 8 GB vram is the most popular setup.

Also, wasn’t the ram upgradeable in the gabecube?

I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.

It’s all about the price… and the very recent years weren’t exactly kind in relation for price per performance

Yes RAM is upgradable using SODIMM modules I believe.

Yes RAM is upgradable using SODIMM modules I believe.

These figures just haven‘t gone up all that much over the last decade. Sure, you can get 128GB of RAM and 24GB of VRAM if you‘re willing to pay for it. But if you don‘t want to spend upwards of $5000 for your PC and you‘re maybe not that experienced, you might just look for a gaming rig from a vendor you‘ve heard of before and get 16GB RAM and 8GB VRAM even in 2025 with current-gen hardware.

Yep, just like a regular gabeputer.

I agree, I think it’s all about affordability and ease of use. If they can sell them for a nice price (somewhere around the price of a PS5 pro) and they’re easy to use I don’t see a reason why they wouldn’t sell. Hell, I might even buy one myself. I have a very old gaming pc (close to 10 years old now) and even though I’ve replaced some parts over the years (ram, GPU, storage), the core of it is still very outdated and it might almost be cheaper to switch to something like this then to upgrade my existing pc.

I’m always amazed how much you get taxed for prebuilts. This thing is at least $1k more than what I spent (with a similar config), and the CPU is still worse than the one I got lol.

I’m sure it does, considering even my old busted laptop has hit the Steam hardware survey before, but it’s not one of my primary gaming PCs.

Another way of saying this is Steam Machine is slower than about 44 million gaming PCs (30% x 147 MAU, a very conservative number since that’s monthly and number of users instead of number of computers).

The fact that its GPU is slower than the 5 year old PS5’s, and it only has 8GB VRAM, makes me question Steam Machine’s longevity. And it apparently can’t do FSR4 cause it’s RDNA3.

It needs to be cheap.

Your own time to research, build, debug, service, and troubleshoot your own build is a tax as well.

steeeeeeeam machiiiiiiiiiiine

Why aren’t they using SOBRIGHT modules, are they stupid?

Sure, doesn’t really take that long to research and build it though, and in my experience if you get a prebuilt, most people aren’t gonna like get it serviced or troubleshoot it with CS unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. They’ll likely just live with minor annoyances.

The only significant benefit IMO is if you really end up needing to RMA something (like if the motherboard is shot), you can just RMA the entire thing instead of figuring out which part is messed up. However, I’ve had mixed experiences RMAing laptops before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just as bad for desktops.

It’s definitely not worth $1k+ IMO. If I spent $1k more, I could’ve gotten a 5090.

I knew it. I still clicked but I knew it. The sound in my head. It has never stopped.

I’m rocking a 2060 with an astounding 6GB VRAM… And the only game that gave me trouble so far is Clair Obscur. I had to close everything else, and use a mod to optimize the graphics.

I’ll blame the shitty Nvidia drivers for Linux though, cause there is no shared RAM, unlike on Windows. 8GB with an AMD card should be fine -if a bit limiting- for a generation, except for high end AAA gaming I guess.

This thing has 1/6th the ongoing utility cost of a spec’d out gaming pc (assuming 850w psu and something like 4090 and 7900x3d). Granted it’s not much to run a pc like that, like 15-20 a month, but running this thing will cost like $2-3 at most. Its power supply is 43% smaller than a ps5s.

Not gonna be the deciding factor for most people but something to consider. Does 4k120 really matter vs 4k60? Do you really need to turn every slider to ultra? In a world that is boiling with energy costs that are ever increasing?

Around the wuuuurld around nhe wuuurrrld