YouTuber upgrades Valve’s Steam Machine to a $3000+ beast with 64GB RAM, 4TB SSD

Popular YouTuber and hardware reviewer ETA Prime finally got his hands on the Steam Machine and performed a teardown of the compact $1,428 2TB variant living-room GabeCube powered by SteamOS, which is bundled with a Steam Controller. He also upgraded the Steam Machine to its absolute limits with a 4TB Kingston Fury Renegade NVMe SSD ($999) and 64GB of Crucial DDR5-5600 SODIMM memory ($820), all while documenting how repairable and serviceable the Steam Machine really is. The whole setup cost him around $3,247.

In his teardown video, ETA Prime started by listing the base specs of the Steam Machine, stating that it “ships with 16GB of system RAM and 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, though the VRAM isn’t user-upgradable,” which is fairly obvious given that it is powered by an AMD RDNA 3 Navi 33 graphics processor with 28 compute units. Valve has described the CPU-GPU combo as “semi-custom.”

Accessing the RAM slots required him to unscrew and remove the outer shell. To access the internals, he had to remove two T8 screws on the rear and another four embedded in the rubber feet of the Steam Machine, after which the front shroud popped off with a rubber spudger.

He then removed a few screws around the fan, which is custom-designed for the Steam Machine, and the compact internals slid out of the housing. The main issue he faced was that the motherboard was sandwiched between the huge copper-and-aluminum heatsink and the PSU. He had to unclip several Wi-Fi and antenna lines and unscrew several I/O boards to finally remove the fan and separate the heatsink from the PSU.

The upside was that he didn’t need to remove the heatsink from the CPU and deal with thermal paste while accessing the RAM slots. As for accessing memory, things were pretty straightforward from there on out, since the RAM was situated at the bottom of the motherboard, facing the PSU.

He further mentioned, “Valve uses a single 16GB DDR5-5600 module (CL47) installed in one slot, meaning the system ships in single-channel memory mode.” Still, the Steam Machine features an extra RAM slot for dual-channel support. ETA Prime installed two 32GB Crucial DDR5-5600 SODIMM sticks, which he stated were “overkill” for the Steam Machine.

Accessing the storage was fairly easy, as he only had to remove a single panel and install the new SSD into the M.2 adapter. He mentioned, “The SSD is easy to remove, and Valve has left enough room inside the chassis for a full-size 2280 M.2 SSD, making future storage upgrades much easier.” To skip reinstalling SteamOS on his new 4TB Kingston FURY Renegade, which is rated for up to 7,300 MB/s read and write speeds, he cloned the original drive containing SteamOS.

After reassembling the system, he noticed that it correctly reported 62GB of usable system memory and the full 4TB NVMe drive in SteamOS settings. All in all, ETA Prime spent around $3,247, including the Steam Machine’s price, for an upgraded Valve SteamOS-powered living-room gaming setup.