GoKawiilOn the eve of August, 2026, the DIY PC building market looks bleaker than ever. Over the last 12 months, enthusiasts have endured spiralling prices on DDR4 and DDR5, as well as hard drives and SSDs, driven by shortages induced by massive AI buildouts. But just how bad is the RAM market in 2026, and is it at all possible to buy cheap RAM these days? The short answers are “bad” and “not really, no.” In this brief 2026 ‘State of the Union’ on the RAM market, we observe just how much prices have changed in the last 12 months, and examine whether there really is any hope for PC builders at all.
It was around July last year that the alarm bells really started ringing when it came to RAM pricing, with TrendForce warning of 45% increases in the second half of the year. Until then, both RAM and SSDs had been something of an afterthought when it came to PC building. Not that those components weren’t important, but rather that you knew you could always find a cheap 32GB DDR5 kit and a decent SSD for whichever build you were planning. The tough decisions were choosing between AMD and Intel’s respective platforms, and trying to find a decent graphics card.
So what has happened since?
Latest Videos From Tom's Hardware Watch full video here:
What a difference a year makes
(Image credit: Future)
To see the impact of the AI crunch on RAM pricing, I had a bit of a dig through the Tom’s Hardware archives, but I should warn you: It’s not pleasant reading. This time last year, we had just come through the throes of Amazon’s 2025 Prime Day event, held in July as opposed to this year’s June offering. As is customary, we offered our thoughts on a great PC build using Prime Day discount parts featuring a Crucial Pro 32GB DDR5 6000 memory kit, reduced from $119 to just $90. One year later, that very same kit now costs $459. That’s if you can even buy one, of course, as there was only one left in stock when I wrote this. Oh, also, Crucial no longer exists. Feeding the AI machine is proving so lucrative that Micron literally wound up its consumer memory and SSD offering so that it could put all of its efforts into HBM and enterprise.
The story is similar wherever you look. Our pick for the best RAM for gaming in 2026 remains G.Skill’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000. When we reviewed this kit back in 2023, we bemoaned that users were paying the early adopter DDR5 tax. The price? A paltry $179. You now can’t buy 32GB of DDR5 for less than $379. G.SKill’s kit subsequently sank in price to an even $100; in August 2026 it’ll cost you $599.99. I guess you could call that a late adopter tax.
Even 16GB of DDR5 6000 will set you back more than $200 these days, which is double the price for half the capacity you could buy a year ago. Large kits, like Corsair’s Vengeance 192GB (4x48GB) offering, now cost upwards of $2,600, more than most pre-built PCs.
The death of Crucial
... continue reading