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 the neighborhood of the AMD Radeon RX 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.