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.
This really bums me out not cuz I was looking to buy one but because I wanted it to shake the market up and make every company do better for the consumer… I feel like this price takes them completely out of the console market and purely into the entry-level PC market where I think it still is a decent specs and price for that market. It’s just not what it was made to be
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.
That’s what I was thinking: early COVID, and it’s not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too…
Per gb price of ram is now almost 50% higher than during the peak of COVID price spike that lasted just 3 months. I’m comparing the current gen at the time - ddr4 during COVID vs ddr5 now
Much longer than that. There was a spike in 2021 that brought high end 2x8gb ddr4 kits to about $180-200 but that’s still significantly less than what you pay for decent ddr5 now. I think you’d have to look to back to early DDR3 or even further to DDR2 prices to get higher per gb amounts.
SSD prices were this high briefly (2-3 months) mid-2021. Before that you’d have to look all the way back to times where 1tb was the largest consumer grade SSD you could buy
I bought a PNY 2tb drive to upgrade my Steam Deck in August of 2025, it was $95 (USD). Today the 1tb version is $165, 2tb is $290.
We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.
Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.
While I was looking today I noticed Samsung drives have jumped way more than PNY have.
The PNY 512gb drives were $114, while like you said, Samsung is $285!
Even worse is that I used to be able to get Crucial drives for less than Samsung, and I trust them way more. The Samsung ones are fine, but we’ve never lost a single Crucial SSD in 14 years.
I’ll take a look at the PNY ones. We actually can use 256gb, since these are just backup drives that get a data dump every 5 minutes, so that may save some $.
just looked up my upgrade.
1TB bought in november 2024
Paid 74€ for it.
Similarly specced ssd costs 210€ today. Fucking hell
Edit: the exact same ssd costs 165-210€
I just checked this today too. A year ago in June I bought two WD Blue 2,5" SSDs for ~165€, shipping included. Today the very same drive is 213€/each at the same store, before shipping.
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.
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.
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.
changing the design now
Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn’t only today or yesterday.
It was still well after the hardware was designed.
Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It’s doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.
What the other responders have said aside, are you seriously comparing a hardware focused company the size of Asus to Valve who’s hardware business is more of a side thing?
Key word: fart out
Not starting from scratch. Those are planned out years in advance.
Not everyone wants a mediocre upgrade.
Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors. Changing them would have required getting AMD to design new chips, not swapping out off-the-shelf parts. AMD doesn’t yet have an RDNA4 replacement for the GPU, so they would probably only go up to RDNA3.5, and that might not have been enough of a boost to even be worth the trouble.
The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors.
Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it’s not an APU design.
Literally on the Steam Machine page:
- CPU: Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
- GPU: Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
In the total project timeframe it takes to design and produce a machine, that is now.
