Crippled is just click/rage bait. The largest difference was about 20%. But most games was much less.

That said, the Steam Machine only ships with DDR5-5600 with poor timings, so there may be more performance gains from installing faster RAM, if indeed any tuning can be done.

I mean, far be it from me to get in the way of anyone's hobby. There are people who have hacked all kinds of hardware.

But...the point of the Steam Machine is to be a pre-packaged, off-the-shelf plug-it-in-and-play console. From a practical gaming standpoint...if you're going to be doing something like modifying the system at that level, why wouldn't you just roll your own system from scratch?

I mean, if we were talking, say, a closed console, sure, I get it. If you could get some kind of edge in playing Game X that only runs on that console, that'd be unique.

But, I mean...this is the PC. It's an open platform. You can just, you know, build a faster system if you want a faster system, and plenty of vendors will sell you one if you want, or you can build one as a DIY project. My desktop will greatly outperform a Steam Machine. Costs more, but it also is gonna cost more to rip the memory out of a Steam Machine and put faster stuff in.

Like...if I were doing a critique of the Steam Machine, I'd expect it to be something like "what is the user experience like versus the Playstation when just plugging it into a television and setting it up", not "if I replace hardware in the thing, how fast can I get it running?"

I think both conversations are worth having. It's important to point out that this will underperform compared to the PS5, and cost quite a bit more. But also, it's good to know what performance improvements can come from upgrades, since that's an advantage PCs have over consoles. It lets you buy a base version now, and get a more powerful version without having to buy an entirely new machine later. Granted, it still doesn't make the steam machine a smart financial decision.

While it might be click/rage bait, my personal inflection point in performance impact is whether the difference is in single or double digit percentage points.