I, uh, completely took apart a Steam Machine by accident. What began as merely wanting a closer look at its RAM setup ended up as a more-or-less full teardown, the heavily layered, almost Russian Doll-like structure of Valve’s teeny-tiny PC demanding a component be removed for a component to be removed for a component to be removed. Before I’d even noticed my screwdrivin’ arm getting tired, the Machine’s guts lay strewn across my desk – not too gorily to put back together, but in far, far more individual pieces than I’d naively intended, or had dared to attempt in my main review.
Still, this did provide the opportunity for a much closer assessment of the Steam Machine’s upgrade potential and repairability, as well as how easily it will reveal its secrets. After all, for all the inspiration it takes from simplified, lounge-dwelling consoles, it is ostensibly a PC, and the thing about PCs is that there’s always someone out there who’ll want to rejig and rebuild their own. Just, y’know, on purpose.
Part I: Ease of use, or lack thereof
After all the guitar pick prying involved with opening a Steam Deck, I anticipated the Steam Machine being a much simpler open-it-up job. And it is – next to the fingernail shredding hazards that are the Deck case’s fastening clips, the Machine’s shell cracks open with a few turns of a Torx screwdriver. Two screws on the back, four hidden in the feet, and the whole internal assembly slides out.
Beyond that, though? Whew. In a way, the Steam Machine’s innards are a thing of strange industrial beauty: an exceptionally compacted amalgamation of metal, plastic, and circuit boards where vital components hide snugly within the corners of larger parts, not a single square centimetre going to waste. That compactedness, however, means every individual piece is locked and entwined in others that ways that could be intimidatingly distinct from standard tower-style desktops. There, almost everything will be instantly accessible from within a main chamber; here, it’s common to have to dismantle something like the rear video output ports before you can remove the heatsink.
That’s weird! And inconvenient, depending on how deep within the structure your target component lies – I’m going to write a step-by-step guide separately, but according to the draft text I scribbled as I was disassembling, a combined SSD replacement and RAM upgrade involves thirty-nine individual steps. On a mid-tower that’d be, what, six? And many of these are moves that, again, you won’t be familiar with if you’ve only ever tinkered inside traditional desktops, and handling shrunk-down Steam Machine parts like its ribbon cables can feel much more precarious than their chunky full-size counterparts.
Novice tinkerers do catch some breaks. A T9- or T8-sized Torx screwdriver is the only piece of semi-specialist equipment you really need; I used a pry bar for most of the ribbon cables, but it’s not strictly necessary, especially if you’re blessed with smaller fingers than my bumbling handwursts. There also no viable DIY project that would involve the reapplication of thermal paste, removing one of the most perilous potential failure points of regular PC building. Perhaps even more so than with the Steam Deck, though, I’d only recommend diving into the Steam Machine if you’ve got both time and patience to spare, with at least some confidence in your finer motor skills.
Part II: Down with upgrades
The good news here is that upgrading/replacing the Steam Machine’s stock SSD is, in spite of everything I’ve just said, a breeze. This is the sole, major internal component that’s accessible as soon as that assembly pops out of the case, and the M.2 slot will happily accept another Steam Deck-sized 2230 drive or, after moving the screw stud down to the second hole, a full-size 2280 SSD. The slot ‘only’ uses the PCIe 4.0 interface, so a newer PCIe 5.0 drive wouldn’t reach its fastest speeds, but that’s fine – 5.0 SSDs tend to be even pricier than 4.0 models are, usually in exchange for only marginally faster load times.
Everything else, sadly, is either fixed in place or a pain in the arse. There’s no upgrading the CPU or GPU, as these are part of a semi-custom setup, fully integrated in the one-of-a-kind motherboard. This, too, can’t be swapped out, and while the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip looks like a determined modder could rip it out and replace it, it’s not a simple socket/unsocket deal like most desktop parts are.
That leaves the RAM. Despite the Steam Machine having two DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, Valve currently only populates one of them, with a single 16GB stick. This isn’t the best possible 16GB configuration for performance, but does mean you could potentially just slide in a second stick without having to shelve or sell the original – not the worst thing in a memory crisis. Either way, we’re basically talking standard-issue laptop RAM, with nothing soldered down or fundamentally inaccessible, so the option’s there if you want to upgrade.
Why you’d want to, though, is a different question. Remember those 39 steps? The Steam Machine might let you play with its RAM, but it also hides those two slots at the very bottom of its main assembly, obscuring the memory beneath layer upon layer of disassembly work. As if Valve were so traumatised by the experience of sourcing said memory that they swore to seal it away, like the cursed tome of some vanquished skeleton mage. Besides, even if you dp excavate the RAM slots, you can only fill them by purchasing two sticks of (currently) the most overpriced components in modern PC hardware history. For what will almost certainly be, at best, single-digit framerate gains in more CPU-heavy games.
In other words, yes, you can upgrade the Steam Machine’s RAM. But I wouldn’t bother.
Part III: Right to repair
So far, poking around the very small Steam Machine must sound like a very big waste of time. However, the benefit of having so many non-core components take the form of individual, manually removable parts is that – intentionally or otherwise – it’s impressively repairable.
Relatively speaking, of course. You still can’t uncouple the CPU from the motherboard, as you could a dead processor in a desktop. But next to something like the Steam Deck, a console, or an awful lot of laptops, it should be much easier to swap a single defective component without needing to drop £879 (minimum) on a whole new Machine. In some places, in fact, it actually does disassemble into finer grains of PC than a desktop: the front I/O ports, for example, are part of a discrete, unscrewable panel, on which the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip also hides, while the microSD card slot can be decoupled from this panel in turn. The DisplayPort/HDMI ports also have their own, removable daughterboard, as does the SSD’s M.2 slot, and the cluster of rear USB ports. The fan shroud, heatsink, and custom power supply can all be separated, too.
Granted, another key aspect of DIY repair potential – the availability of replacement parts – is still in the works, at the time of writing. While Valve tell me that iFixit will stock these parts, as they do for Steam Deck components, these aren’t currently available. In fairness, the Steam Machine only just sorted its first round of reservations, so for now the market for replacements is comprised entirely of curious journalists. But it’d also be fair to worry that hardware shortages might not be specific to memory and storage – Valve have openly admitted that they don’t have as much Steam Machine stock as they’d like, and so the parts that they can produce would surely go into for-sale units first before there’s enough left over for iFixit.
Still, that should come in time. The truly hard part’s already done: the foundations of high repairability have been built into the Steam Machine itself, and in a way that reminds us that for all its lengthy disassembly procedures, limited upgrade routes, and hard-to-reach RAM, this black cube is still a PC at heart. I just hope I don’t have to go inside it again.