Steam Machine's RAM Configuration May Cause Problems For You Later On
Whether you get a Steam Machine with one 16 GB stick or two 8 GB sticks appears to be completely random, which may cause issues for some users down the road.
The reason why this may be a downgrade is because 2x8 GB uses a dual channel system, whereas 1x16 GB will be a single channel. Therefore, using two sticks of RAM tends to be a little faster for some tasks as opposed to using a single one.
This can mean losing up to 20% performance for tasks which are bottlenecked by memory, which is a small difference in gaming but has a larger effect for desktop apps.
“It was quite literally impossible to buy 8GB [sticks], at least at the quantities we're looking to buy mostly because everybody wants higher storage, and that's more profitable, so all the capacity shifted to that,” Valve’s Yazan Aldehayyat told Digital Foundry regarding this.