Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.
The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.
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Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.
The point of shitty old processors was to get them cheap. Now that RAM and storage are the biggest factors, they could have gone with newer processors and not be significantly more expensive but significantly more performant.
Shitty, old processors? In which way?
Zen 4 is literally just a single generation behind current latest gen architecture. And you’re way off on the pricing too - Zen5 APUs are essentially the AI 300/400 lineup, of which the higher end models still cost well over what Valve would find affordable. Meanwhile the GPU Valve chose to be integrated into the SM is 30-40% more performant than the 890M bundled with the Ryzen AI 370 (the only affordable kinda-high-end Zen5 APU).
So no, it’s neither old nor shitty.
The entire cooling system is designed around those processors. Changing them would delay the Steam Machine by multiple years. Also, those processors may be old (or more accurately, based on an older architecture), but they’re certainly not shitty.
Sure. Fans work totally different when there’s a slightly newer processor.
Wasn’t that assumption part of why the i9 MacBooks a few generations back had massive heating issues?
The fans and heatsinks weren’t enough to cool the i9, even though they were fine with the i7, so performance would quickly go into the floor when they started throttling.
I used to have a near maxed out 2019 i9 mbp. The 2020 base model m1 blew it out of the water performance-wise.
Granted, a big part of that was the apple silicon, but the i9 was supposed to be a powerhouse. It just wound up spending most of its time thermally throttled.
It’s weird how supply chains work, and how design changes are at the very start of a very long process that makes changing the design now a very costly, risky thing.
Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn’t only today or yesterday.
It was still well after the hardware was designed.
Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It’s doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.
What the other responders have said aside, are you seriously comparing a hardware focused company the size of Asus to Valve who’s hardware business is more of a side thing?
Key word: fart out
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn’t yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.
Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it’s not an APU design.
Literally on the Steam Machine page:
Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.
Eh, the writing was on the wall the moment DRAM manufacturers refused to expand capacity and instead stopped consumer sales in favour of corporate batch sales.
Many people were expecting the AI bubble to last well into 2029
Of course. And it will last for years.
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.