New Steam Machine rival offers a Ryzen 9 CPU and RX 7600 XT for $849, but you have to bring your own RAM

We have another Steam Machine rival in our midst, and this one is interesting. AOOSTAR quietly expanded global sales of the GODY mini PC this week, and based on the spec sheet alone, it makes Valve's console look a little slow.

The GODY Mini-PC packs a Ryzen 9 7940HX, a 16-core, 32-thread Zen 4 chip, alongside a dedicated Radeon RX 7600 XT with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. That's double the amount of VRAM found in Valve's box, plus Wi-Fi 7 and dual 2.5 GbE LAN ports for good measure. All of that lands at $849, a full $200 under the Steam Machine's $1,049 starting price. Looking at the listing, it looks too good to be true, and then you scroll down a bit.

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Here's the catch. The $849 price is for a barebone unit only. AOOSTAR hands you the CPU, GPU, chassis, and cooling, then leaves you to buy and install your own DDR5 memory and M.2 SSD. Normally, that would just be a minor inconvenience for anyone who has spare parts lying around. However, right now it is a much bigger problem, because DRAM prices have gone completely sideways.

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We have already covered how the same memory shortage pushed Valve's own pricing target from around $750 up to $1,049, and things have not gotten better since. Fill that GODY Mini-PC with 32GB of DDR5 and a decent SSD today, and you are probably looking at another few hundred dollars on top, which puts the "cheaper than Steam Machine" pitch on some shaky ground.

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The Mini-PC's form factor is quite compact, but it is no Steam Machine. The GODY measures roughly 200 x 193 x 80mm, noticeably bigger than the Steam Machine's compact 152 x 156 x 162mm cube, and it looks more like a shrunken desktop tower than a living room console. It also runs Windows 11 out of the box rather than SteamOS, though AOOSTAR says it works fine with Steam Big Picture Mode or third-party Linux setups like Bazzite.

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The GODY joins a growing pile of would-be Steam Machine rivals popping up since Valve's pricing landed, including the DIY Terk Box built by an AMD engineer and the French retailer's short-lived "Stim Machine," which we mentioned in our look at a suspicious $688 clone out of China. None of them has fully cracked the value equation yet. It always seems that each clone is missing one or two key components.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Question #1

Can the RX 7600 XT in the GODY be swapped or upgraded later, and what GPU power/size limits should buyers know?

The article does not state whether the RX 7600 XT in the GODY can be swapped or upgraded later. It does state the mini PC is compact (roughly 200 x 193 x 80mm) and includes a dedicated Radeon RX 7600 XT with 16GB GDDR6, but it gives no GPU power or size limits for upgrades.

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Faster silicon is easy to find if you're looking at one or two generations of old hardware. Getting the whole package, memory included, to a reasonable price during a global RAM shortage is the actual hard part, and it might be why Valve's $1,049 figure looks less unreasonable the longer this crisis drags on.