After reporting how much the Steam Machine costs, I could tell already. RAM manufacturers are in paradise right now!
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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So we thought we'd just kick it to the customers
If RAM prices are so bad, couldn't Valve give an option to order a Steam Machine with no RAM? So that people could use RAM they already have or buy some locally for a lower price.
They give away their OS for free. So add a motherboard, a CPU, a case and a graphics card to it and you can use your own RAM.
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My question is: how far back in time do we have to go to get to where RAM and SSD prices were this high (for a given capacity) in the past? Like 2021?
The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips.
2013 - but even then it wasn't this bad.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/06/china-fire-memory-chip-prices
There were also supply chain problems during Covid.
2020-2023:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896322017293
Well...but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn't asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.
PC Part Picker's memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org's Wayback Engine.
First of all, here's a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:
So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.
They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that's $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it's probably never been that expensive.
However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.
If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:
Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it's come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.
Inflation-adjusted, that's $144 in 2019 dollars.
It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.
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Bought a 256GB ssd for like 320€ in around 2011 (maybe 2012) so there's that.
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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.
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.
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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.
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