Some of Valve's Steam Machines are coming with single-channel memory but does it really matter much for gaming performance?

Valve’s Steam Machine leaves some performance on the table in CPU-heavy games, as shown by tests using dual-channel DDR5 RAM.

TL;DR: Steam Machines will ship with either a single 16GB RAM stick or two 8GB sticks, but buyers cannot select the configuration beforehand. Valve says performance differences are minimal, and the ...

Putting your RAM in the wrong slots will limit your bandwidth, ultimately costing performance.

You may assume that once your computer shows the correct memory capacity and applications run normally without any warnings, there is no problem. With RAM, people think it either works or doesn't.

Valve's decision to ship its latest Steam Machine with a single memory module is drawing closer scrutiny as early testing ...

Not necessarily. If the motherboard has four slots, by placing the sticks in the right slots you can put the 16 GB stick in one channel and the other two 8 GB sticks in the other channel, giving you ...