iFixIt Tears Apart a Beta Version of Steam Machine

cool

benefits drop off heavily after the i5 so that's not shocking. All an ssd would do is help with load times. I don't understand the ram unless it is doing something else I don't know about.

Because ram isn't dirt cheap anymore, prices have been going up.

8GB is $60+ right now. That expensive enough that if you are mass producing something you won't spend it unless it's needed.

you're creating negative energy... we need positive energy

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8GB is $60+ right now. That expensive enough that if you are mass producing something you won't spend it unless it's needed.

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Yea, last year they claimed a "shortage" on SDRAM. So we are now suffering with higher prices on something which was 20% cheaper on avg 1 year ago.

I'm trying to do that at work

Mine came free with mobo

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Hoped that would prevent all caps responses alluding to how stupid my statement was. My line of thinking was from my understanding (albiet maybe wrong) that UMA "graphics cards" on laptops basically stole/dedicated system RAM to use for graphical operations. So by them having the 3gb ded mem on that GTX then that would eliminate the need for excessive RAM.

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A reasonable thought. In most laptops (non-gaming laptops), you'll be using integrated graphics provided by the CPU, its memory shared with your system memory. For example, Dynamic Video Memory Technology (DVMT) in Intel chips will dynamically allocate system memory to use as video memory depending on what you're doing at the time and how much you need. There are also low-end standalone graphics cards that can access system memory to save cost. These aren't gaming cards though, and they have a small framebuffer.

The dedicated graphics cards used in these steamboxes use fast GDDR5 RAM, as opposed to the slower DDR3 system RAM. At the moment, in a purely PC gaming environment, you get the best performance out of having faster exclusive/dedicated memory for your GPU rather than shared system memory, because the additional capacity (beyond 2-4GB) is far less important than the raw, un-bottlenecked speed of dedicated memory.

One thing to consider regarding system resources, is the pagefile. I am interested to see how SteamOS will handle this. In the days where Windows could only work with 4GB of RAM max, you needed the pagefile to ensure smooth operations consistently (the pagefile used your slow, clunky hard drive as an additional source for system memory). Now with a much higher cap on how much RAM an OS and motherboard can handle, a lot of people do run 16GB or more and disable or reduce the pagefile (to free up precious space on their SSDs). The extra RAM may end up having a use if it's optimized properly -- on-the-fly RAM disk, predictive caching between the 8GB SSD and the system RAM, etc. It would surprise me if SteamOS/Linux could handle this architecture that effectively though, at least in the early stages.

Ultimately, I don't see a need for 16GB of RAM in these machines yet, but it could very well be a simple marketing decision. They are trying to put PCs in a console environment, and consolers are not hardware-savvy. Enhancing a few of those recognizable numbers like RAM, CPU clock, etc. gives it a little more appeal even if it doesn't exactly improve performance. I assume that they'll be offering some severely scaled back models after beta testing. The hardware as it stands is not cost efficient.

That was the review/thoughts I was looking for from the GB. Thanks for taking the time