Valve recently released its
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for the month of January 2018. As a part of our new, regularly monthly feature, we're going to break down and analyze the latest hardware trends among Steam users. It's important to note that Steam's hardware survey is voluntary, and as a result, it is not completely indicative of real-world numbers.Table of contents
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GPUs
Nvidia owns 86.4 percent of the GPU market share according to Valve's survey. This figure actually represents a 1.6% increase from the previous month. AMD trails in a distant second with 8.1%, followed by Intel's integrated graphics solutions at 5.2%.
90.9 percent of users reported owning
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GPUs, which indicate that most users are equipped with modern graphics cards. The most popular GPU is Nvidia's 2016-released
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with 14.2% of the pie. The mid-range GeForce GPU is a great choice for maxing out most games at 1080p with smooth frame rates. It's followed in second place by its 2015-released predecessor, the GTX 960, which has 10.5 percent of the market share. Most users reported having graphics cards with 2GB of video memory, which is what the GTX 960 has.CPUs
Intel dominated the CPU landscape with 91.9 percent of the market last month. This is up .7 percent despite recent news early in the month that Intel's processors are vulnerable to
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.70.2% of users reported owning a quad-core CPU, which is what we recommend for most gamers. Second place went to dual-core processors with 25.1% of the pie.
30 percent of users reported having CPUs with clock speeds that fall between 3GHz and 3.29GHz. In second place with 23% are users with CPU frequencies between 3.3GHz and 3.69GHz.
RAM
Like last month, the most popular RAM allotment is 8GB, which is the minimum amount of memory we recommend to gamers. It is losing some ground to users with 12GB of RAM or more, however, which is in second place with 39.1%. 16GB is what we recommend for gamers who also like to run memory-intensive applications like Google Chrome.
Resolution
71.1 percent of Steam users reported that they use 1920x1080-resolution monitors. This is up 1.4% compared to last month. In second place at 10% is 1366x768, which is an old, popular laptop standard. In third at 3.5% is 2560x1440, which is the resolution we recommend for most gamers with a GTX 1070/RX Vega 56 or greater GPU.
What about 4K? It only has .66 percent of the resolution pie, though it did gain .2 percent market share over the past month.
While 1920x1080 is the most popular gaming resolution, 34.8% of Steam users reported using two 1080p panels.
Storage
63.7 percent of Steam users own a hard drive that offers at least 1TB of storage. This represents a 2.3 percent growth in this tier compared to the previous month.
26.5% of users reported having between 100 to 249GB of free space, which represents the largest piece of the available storage pie. It's important to highlight that Steam does not differentiate between SSD and HDD storage.
VR Headset
After barely taking the VR lead for the first time last month, the Oculus Rift falls back to a close second place in January. The Vive leads with 46.9 percent of the VR market, which is only .9% higher than the Rift's share.
The more recently released Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets are are slowly beginning to take market share from the Rift and the Vive with 5.1%, which represents a .8% growth from the previous month.
While VR is slowly growing, only .4 percent of Steam users reported owning a VR headset.
Windows
While Windows 10 used to be the most popular operating system among Steam users, it has since fallen to second place and now has a 35.4 percent handle on the OS market. The 64-bit version of Windows 7 leads with 56.6%. The rising popularity of Windows 7 most likely has to do with the large influx of Chinese users playing PUBG, which has become the
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in recent months.Mac
OSX only makes up 1.8 percent of the overall OS pie, but that's up .1 percent compared to last month. Among Mac users, 51.7 percent of them use a Macbook Pro. Apple's MacBook Air follows in second place with 23.6 percent.
Conclusion
If you take the most common components from the Steam survey to spec out a build, how would it look? As you'll see in the spec chart below, it represents a fairly balanced mid-range gaming PC. How does your PC stack up to the average Steam user? Let us know in the comments below!
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
CPU: Intel quad-core clocked between 3GHz to 3.29GHz
System RAM: 8GB
Storage space: 1TB+
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
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