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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 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.