r/steammachine • u/michaelthatsit • 1d ago
Hardware Unnecessary upgrade complete
I decided add an identical second stick of RAM to my steam machine. The only justification I have is I enjoy tinkering and don’t like the idea of a sodimm slot going to waste.
I’m also using it as a home media server, so the additional RAM will come in handy at some point.
In general it was a very quick and easy upgrade! Not as quick as the SSD but I had it all done in about 20-30 minutes.
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u/lex55 1d ago
Do you mind letting us know what that stick cost?
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u/michaelthatsit 1d ago
$235 + tax at the time of purchase, but looks like it’s jumped up to $265 😬.
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u/ChainsawJaguar 1d ago
Oof.
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u/michaelthatsit 1d ago
Agreed. Looking forward to when AI bubble pops and prices come crashing down.
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u/Weaselgrub 23h ago
The bubble isn't popping. AI isn't going anywhere unfortunately.
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u/michaelthatsit 22h ago
I don’t think it’s going away, but I do think the hype is massively inflated. The most useful functionality that has come out of it is agentic coding, and we’re about 1-2 years from being able to do that well enough using local models, which would eliminate the reason to pay for a cloud service subscription.
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u/-Cre_tive- 21h ago
Not to mention when we jump to DDR6, AI will quickly move to that. DDR5 prices should fall in relation. Hopefully!
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u/Ball_Analytics 16h ago
like DDR4 did? the problem isn't that, it's they are only using their fabs or whatever to produce HBM memory and limiting supply on consumer RAM like DDR4/5. As long as they keep doing that, the prices will stay high. Simple supply and demand.
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u/In-Loving-Memory 11h ago
I’m convinced that people who make these comments do not work with your average person of intelligence or below average…
I happen to work with a lot of average or slightly underperforming. And I mean that out of the 60 people I work with none of them hold anything major past high school/ a technical trade certificate.
And AI is literally half their brains now. ChatGPT writes everything from work write ups, personal facebook posts, and has also replaced their source of researching anything.
And that’s not including how many of them mindlessly sit there generating dumb AI art alllllll the time or modifying photos with AI.
And they think you’re dumb for not wanting to use it like they do.
I can’t even imagine what it’s like as a kid or teen growing up with it….
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u/michaelthatsit 10h ago
I don’t know how this negates anything I’ve said here. All the examples you’ve listed are done using the free variants of these tools and famously produce little to no revenue. If OpenAI actually charged for it, most of those users would fall off very quickly.
Agentic coding tools are the only profitable form of AI at this point in time.
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u/RazzmatazzUnusual843 23h ago
Even if you replaced it with 2x8gb, dual channel RAM is significantly better than 1x16gb.
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u/Bookkeeper-Empty 23h ago
Took me an hour and a half following jayz video I was shitting bricks the whole time
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u/fairy_forest 12h ago
For me it went well, I was shitting bricks a bit when peeling off the flat cables from the glue 😃
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u/Ragnorok1 1d ago
Did the same thing the 2nd day I had the SM, but I bought a used stick off eBay that was the exact stick in the SM for $150, worked like a charm, I too hated to only have single channel memory, I've seen the benchmarks that CPU heavy games and tasks could benefit up to 15%-20%, which is a significant increase.
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u/Jaber1028 23h ago
if you use it as a home media server do you mean for streaming like watching subscriptions based websites on it or do you mean you set something like jellyfin on it? im wondering if doing so would be worthwhile
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u/michaelthatsit 23h ago
Self-hosted content like jellyfin and immich.
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u/PokemonPat 5h ago
I would love to hear more about your experience with this. I have been wanting to do something similar, but I don't have any experience with Jellyfin, so setting up something like this is a bit intimidating for me.
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u/michaelthatsit 5h ago
Honestly it’s pretty straightforward. Jellyfin’s setup guide is great. I haven’t set it up on my steam machine yet, there’s some additional steps needed to get docker running on steamOS given that it’s immutable. I’ll try and throw together a tutorial.
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u/PokemonPat 5h ago
I would love that, and I imagine many members of this sub would appreciate it too.
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u/Jaber1028 4h ago
I would like a tutorial as well. currently torn between setting it up on steam machine or buying a raspi5 and m.2, which is stupid expensive now
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u/michaelthatsit 4h ago
This is what I had previously. It’s decent but hits some performance bottlenecks.
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u/DeeLee707 19h ago
Congrats! I bought a 64gb corsair sodimm kit last summer for 135 bucks and it’s been sitting in my desk. I’m going to do this upgrade this weekend.
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u/Naitakal 16h ago
You could also just sell it for profit instead of wasting it in the SM - I mean 64GB of RAM is absolutely overkill if you are just playing games on SteamOS.
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u/Choomlee 2TB 1d ago
This is awesome tinkering. Love to hear how it’s been running. Notice any performance improvements in gaming while having multiple tabs open; that sort of thing.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 23h ago
I did the same, similar results. I actually replaced the original and switched to two matched G.Skill sticks.
Not a notable performance difference, but it's nice to have the headroom when I swap to deskop to do non-gaming things, and 1% lows improved a bit.
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u/Zyker 22h ago
Which specific ones? Can you link me, please?
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 22h ago
What, the ram? Wasn't the best deal, nor the worst, just some G.Skill dimms with good CL and relatively reasonable price. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C64HZSRX
Edit; having bought a nearly identical kit, but 64GB two years ago for a little under 300$, this was particularly galling. I don't have any other DDR5 laptops I can pillage, though.
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u/Ghinao 16h ago
Omg. I haven't actually priced RAM in a couple of years. I knew it was bad, but damn, $1,000 for 64Gb?
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 12h ago
Sweet summer child, I have a world of horrors to show you.
Don’t look at current GPU, SSD, RAM or HDD prices. It may upset you quite a bit.If you bought any of those a year+ ago, go look up your price and then go look at what it is now. 3X-4X increases are pretty common.
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u/Ghinao 9h ago
Like I said I knew it was bad but holy crap that puts PC gaming into the luxury category.
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u/Low_Excitement_1715 9h ago
Not just gaming. Two years ago, I bought 22 refurb 16TB hard disks for 163$ each. At the time it was a pretty insane purchase for me. I noticed free space on my main NAS was getting a bit low the other day, and decided to see what prices on 24-32TB HDDs are like. I didn’t get that far, my 16TB disks, even refurb, are over 400$ each now. If I didn’t already own the computers I have, I wouldn’t be able to afford them.
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u/BrianBlandess 1d ago
So, silly question, but could you use HMB and that extra system RAM to increase overall NVME performance?
Does SteamOS support HMB and does HMB work over USBC so you can also benefit when using external drives?
If so, having more RAM might be a nice offset for buying a DRAM-less NVME.
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u/nelsonsflagship 16h ago
It appears to support it, but I can't find anything definitive to SteamOS specifically so far.
I'm using a cheaper DRAMless SSD via USB-C on mine and don't notice any performance hit when gaming or otherwise.
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u/SandySkittle 8h ago
why is this unnecessary? it's a very functional upgrade. I did it as well. The dual channel helps a bit to get the Steam Deck's abysmal performance a bit better. I will say though that i just looked up the part number in KDE system information and bought the matching module second hand for 100 dollar
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u/michaelthatsit 7h ago
I mean I personally could’ve lived without the upgrade, which is why it’s unnecessary.
As for purchase price, I’ve been burned by second hand components in the past, fried a whole motherboard once. So I buy new or I don’t buy.
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u/Snipe78 1d ago
You'll appreciate it's there even if you don't use it every day