Pc Gaming Has A Pricing Problem, And The Memory Crisis Is...

Occasionally, on one of my rare jaunts out into the real world, someone will ask me what I do for a living. "I write for PC Gamer," I invariably respond. "Oh that's cool," comes the reply. "I'd like to buy a gaming PC, but I looked at the prices recently and…"

You get the idea. I'm also constantly asked by gamers, both online and in the real world, what PC they should buy on a budget, and my response often starts with: "What do you mean by budget?"

We exist in a space where an "affordable" gaming PC usually costs the best part of $1,000, and that's before you get to the monitor, the keyboard, and all the rest of it. Budget by PC gaming standards, sure. Budget by almost any other? Not really.

It's a lot of cash, no matter which way you look at it. And now, thanks to a memory pricing crisis that looks destined to become much, much worse before it has any hope of getting better, those budget rigs are starting to become even more expensive. Our hobby has always had a gatekeeping aspect to the price of entry, but now? It's becoming downright ridiculous.

You can still buy a sub-$1,000 prebuilt with great specs, but that's while current stocks last. All indications suggest that, come 2026, DRAM prices are going to bite so hard when it comes to memory modules, SSDs, and even VRAM, that a decently-powerful rig for less than a grand is going to be very hard to find. And in terms of the DIY market? We're already in deep… waters.

Two years ago, I paid around $100 for the 32 GB Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 kit currently sitting in my machine. Yesterday, I found it for $425. Today, I can't find it in stock anywhere, despite it being, until very recently, one of the most affordable memory kits on the market.

In fact, the cheapest 32 GB DDR5 kit I can find on Amazon at the time of writing is this G.Skill 5400 MT/s set for $340. That's budget DDR5, for mainstream graphics card money.

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Speaking of graphics cards, we've seen the prices stabilise over the past few months after the ludicrous retailer markups the market was subjected to earlier this year. You can now find most current-gen GPUs for around their MSRP, but that's still cold comfort for those looking to build a machine on a tight budget.

You can pick up an 8 GB RTX 5060 for sub-$300 prices, but it's still pretty thin-going if you want to turn the settings up in the demanding stuff at anything over 1080p. D

Source: PC Gamer