Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that the golden age of dirt-cheap PC upgrades is coming to a pretty abrupt end. For the last year or so, we’ve been effectively spoiled. You could pick up a high-speed 2TB NVMe SSD for what felt like pocket change, and DDR5 memory finally became affordable enough for the average gamer to justify the jump to a new platform. Even GPUs were starting to stabilise, and you could find cards for under MSRP. It genuinely felt like the supply chain nightmares, the crypto mining shortages, and the scalper prices of the last few years were finally behind us.
Unfortunately, the hardware market had other plans and now, we’re seeing huge increases in pricing for DDR memory. While DDR4 and, more importantly, DDR5 are the most affected, there’s a lot more going on that’s going to change everything for quite some time too. Effectively, the big thing navigating this whole debacle comes down to AI.
The result is that the cost of your next gaming PC upgrade is climbing, and it’s happening faster than many people realise. So today we’ll be looking at the whole situation. We’ll look at exactly how bad the price hikes are, what other components might be in the firing line, and why buying a prebuilt system might surprisingly be cheaper than building your own right now.
