The Numbers: How Bad Is The Price Hike?
So just how much extra are you going to be paying? Well, if you’ve been waiting for the Christmas holiday deals to upgrade, the numbers make for pretty grim reading.
Let’s start with DDR5, which is the most obvious victim here. Earlier this year, you could pick up a decent 32GB kit of 6000MHz CL30 memory for around $100, give or take ten bucks, and it was the sweet spot for new builds. Fast forward to today, and that same kit is creeping up towards $440, meaning that we’re seeing price increases of nearly 330 to 340% in just a few months. The premium you used to pay for high-end kits is effectively becoming the entry-level price again.
If you thought you were safe sticking with DDR4, think again. As manufacturers shift their focus to DDR5 and HBM, the supply of DDR4 is drying up too. A standard 32GB kit of DDR4-3200, which was under $100 a few months ago, has seen a price jump of around 90%. It’s no longer the budget-friendly saviour it was, and the price gap between the two generations is narrowing simply because everything is getting more expensive.
Then there’s storage, which might actually be the most painful part for the average gamer. We all got used to those incredible deals where a 2TB NVMe drive was around $100. It felt like storage was finally a solved problem. Today, though, you’ll struggle to find a decent brand-name 2TB drive for under $160. NAND flash contract prices have shot up by over 60% in some cases, and that cost is being passed directly on to us.
When you add it all up, the cost of a mid-range PC build has effectively risen by $250 to $300 just on memory and storage alone compared to a few months ago. That’s the price of a CPU or a tier up in graphics card performance that you’re now spending just to get the same capacity you could have had for peanuts earlier this year.
I had a friend of a friend ask me a couple of weeks ago to spec up a PC with a $2500 budget. 9800X3D, 64GB of 6000MHz CL30 memory, 5070 Ti. An overall good spec. Just a few days later I had to ask him if he could up his budget closer to $3200, to which he asked me what extra he’d be getting for that $700 uplift. I had to be honest and tell him that he’d be getting nothing extra, and that DDR5 in that capacity was now bordering on $1000 in some cases.
