- The Steam Machine now has a collection of official repair guides
- They’re written by iFixit and are commendably thorough
- The only catch is that they highlight the trickiness of some repairs or upgrades, notably the system RAM
The Steam Machine now has a whole raft of repair guides from iFixit, which is great to see – although they have highlighted some fiddly and less-than-ideal aspects when it comes to working inside Valve’s compact PC.
TechPowerUp spotted that iFixit published 18 repair guides for the Steam Machine, which cover essential maintenance or the replacement of parts in the device
It’s a thorough set of instructional guides, detailing how to replace parts of the chassis or the Steam Machine’s fan, and carry out key upgrades to the RAM and SSD. It even shows you how to replace the motherboard, and how to properly clean and maintain the Steam Machine.
Valve has a partnership with iFixit which has produced a similarly in-depth collection of guides for the Steam Deck, and also sells replacement parts for that handheld, from thumbsticks and bumper buttons through to a new screen or battery. Replacement parts are reportedly coming for the Steam Machine, too, though they aren’t on sale yet.
Analysis: easy does it with some of these repairs
This is great, and what I particularly like is the cleaning guide, which is an effective reminder of what a dust magnet PCs can be — and to keep the innards of the Steam Machine relatively dust-free.
However, what this also makes clear, as noted at the outset, is that some of the replacement procedures are relatively tricky — notably upgrading (or replacing) the system RAM.
Okay, so it’s nothing too bad if you take your time and work carefully, but there are a lot of steps — 49, in fact, and that’s to reach the memory to replace it (then you have to reverse those steps and put the Steam Machine back together). This isn’t something that less tech-savvy people will be able to do, at least not without running a serious risk of breaking something else in the process.
Indeed, I’d say you’d need to be pretty confident in your abilities to perform a RAM replacement. Removing the fan is one of most awkward steps, and one method involves heating the glue (with a hair drier if you don’t have iFixit’s iOpener heat pad) to make the two attached antennas easier to detach. This, and a few other fiddlier aspects, are where I could see something quite easily going awry.
As one of the readers of VideoCardz observed: “Upgrading RAM is super annoying. They should place it near SSD or something in the next revision, because as it is now you have to basically dismantle the whole damn thing. Not that it’s particularly ‘hard’ to do, but it’s super annoying and you can actually damage something, like Wi-Fi antennas for example.”
Still, I can’t knock the quality of the guides, and the thoroughness of the step-by-step instructions, complete with diagrams and information about exactly which way you should orientate the device when moving onto the next step.
Of course, you won’t be able to perform repairs until you have the replacement parts, and hopefully iFixit will stock these before long (as it does with the Steam Deck). Right now, parts are obviously thin on the ground, as Valve needs them for manufacturing as many Steam Machines as it can, but that situation will change in time.
