Shortly after Valve launched the long-awaited Steam Machine, reviews were quick to point out its middling performance and high price, with the gaming console scoring in between the AMD Radeon RX 6600 and 7600 in gaming tests. As it turns out, one of the compromises Valve made in order to launch the Steam Machine at a slightly lower price was to use single-channel DDR5 and not dual-channel DDR5. Curiously, even though you might expect the Steam Machine to suffer from a GPU bottleneck, given the GPU specs and limited VRAM, recent tests by Gamers Nexus on YouTube show that the mini PC is capable of up to 19.4% more performance in CPU-intensive workloads.
The YouTube channel’s testing team put the Steam Machine through a battery of CPU and GPU tests, and, as expected, the biggest differences showed up in CPU-intensive workloads, with GPU tests demonstrating a peak performance difference of 8.7% in Baldur’s Gate 3 at 1080p in Ultra settings. That’s not to say there weren’t improvements to gaming workloads. Especially when targeting high frame rates in games, as would be the case with e-sports games, for instance, differences of up to 15% could be observed. These substantial differences were observed by Gamers Nexus when testing Baldur’s Gate 3 at 1080p and low settings, where a 15.3% performance improvement was exhibited, while Outer Worlds 2 at 1080p and low settings also showed a 14.7% performance improvement going from single-channel to dual-channel SODIMMs. The other major outlier was Resident Evil 4 at 1080p and “prioritize performance” mode, which showed a 10% improvement in frame rate.
The full video follows:
When it comes to GPU benchmarks, Baldur’s Gate 3 was the only outlier, with most games netting between 0.6% and 3.6% performance uplift when played at high or ultra graphics settings at 1080p. The most important takeaway here is that productivity workloads will see the biggest performance uplifts. That was highlighted by the 19.4% performance improvement in the 7Zip file compression benchmarking, but it may also be applicable to things like video encoding and decoding, but swapping out the RAM to dual-channel does not seem to affect rendering performance in applications like Reddit.
Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus also notes that, during the testing, the Steam Machine exhibited instability at boot with certain DDR5 SODIMM sticks, and the team had to track down a memory stick that exactly matched Valve’s OEM SODIMM, which may prove challenging to end users. Valve currently does not list the DDR5 speed frequency compatibility for the Steam Machine, and certain memory timings and frequency combinations may prove problematic. That said, the Steam Machine only ships with DDR5-5600 with poor timings, so there may be more performance gains from installing faster RAM, if indeed any tuning can be done.