This week’s most popular game is not a robovoiced extraction shooter or a buggy martial arts RPG, but Guess The Steam Machine Price: a well-meaning (if largely speculative) timepasser wherein whoever most accurately converts Valve’s teasing into a final street price for the resurrected SteamOS mini-PC wins. In 2026, when it launches.
I feel left out, so will have a go myself below, though there’s quite a serious kink in mine or indeed anyone’s plan to ticket the Steam Machine by speccing an equivalent DIY PC. Alas, RAM prices have gone stratospheric, in a manner not seen among computing components since the Great Graphics Card Dumpster Fire of 2020.
As then, but now, the cause is an industry-wide shortage, only this time trigged by – you again – artificial intelligence. In short, AI data centres are rapidly expanding, eating up memory output and leaving scant RAM supplies for consumer PC building. What’s left has, broadly since October but this past week especially, been slapped with obscene markups: this unremarkable Crucial DDR5 32GB kit, for example, was £88 a month ago. Now it’s £206. A bog-standard Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB set? Was £100 in September, now yours for just £350. This premium 64GB kit was already pricey at £210, again back in September, and now sits at £557 – more than an RTX 5070, a base PS5, or 1,011 packets of M&S extra cream Bourbon biscuits. 1,011! Makes me sick.
Hardware manufacturers can purchase at scale, and may have enough RAM sticks squirreled away to maintain production, potentially for the several months that shortages are expected to continue. But those who haven’t stockpiled parts will end up feeling the crunch – Microsoft are allegedly considering yet another price hike for their Xbox Series X/S consoles to cover the higher memory costs.
None of this bodes well for the Steam Machine. Worst case, Valve must pay top dollar for its DDR5 modules (these are smaller, laptop-style sticks rather than desktop DIMMs, but the type in question still appears affected) and bump up the Machine’s price to compensate. Best case, they have enough memory from the pre-crisis days for a more affordable launch. But, at some point that stock will run out, and Valve will need to choose between supplying more Steam Machines with this AI tax in play or wait it out while those digital shelves grow cobwebs.
For now, though, nobody actually knows what the situation will be in early 2026, likely including Valve themselves. Indeed, it wouldn’t be remotely surprising if fluctuating parts prices are among the reasons why they didn’t just announce pricing for the Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame as part of the initial reveal. In any case, I wouldn’t put too much weight on anyone’s Steam Machine price estimates just because they’ve totted up the cost of a similar home-built PC.
Anyway, here’s my Steam Machine price estimate, based on totting up the cost of a similar home-built PC. I’m specifically going for parts that would closely replicate the Steam Machine’s performance, based on my testing of it at Valve HQ last month, and not necessarily its on-paper specs. Partly because it has something akin to a custom-built laptop CPU and nobody’s going to bother putting something like that in a DIY desktop.
- Case: Lian Li A3 mATX Wood Edition (£60)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600X (£162)
- GPU: Zotac GeForce RTX 5050 Twin Edge (£219)
- RAM: Crucial DDR5 1x16GB (£103, ouchies)
- SSD: WD Blue SN500 500GB (£60)
- Motherboard: ASRock B650I Lightning WiFi ITX (£140)
- Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black (£30)
- PSU: Corsair RM850e (£95)
- Total: £869
Hope that was helpful. It won’t be. But I hope.
