HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.
Building a computer like 5 years from now will be a weird experience because you will buy most parts from brands that you have never heard of. Very few of the manufacturers we know today will still be around by that time.
They will have Chinese RAM by then, so yeah, its going to be the random made up Amazon/Temu Chinese brands.
AmzRamBar24
Which is the same thing as the GOODKINDSTICK that everyone says is really good, but only if you get the V3.65 from 2025, the new stuff is garbage.
And you have to be careful because their versioning is broken. Version 5 is older than 3.
The Xbox 1 says hi
Yes, this is Microsoft. They have some issues with counting.
Much more than doubled. Most high-TB drives are not in stock anywhere, and even if you find a drive, the best deals are around $26-28/TB for used drives, whereas before new deals would be $10/TB. If you’re looking for a specific new capacity, you may be paying $36-40/TB.
I’ve been putting 12tb used SAS drives in my Plex server. The used market went up about 30% from last year for the same drives. I think I paid $115 each before, now they’re $150.
I don’t doubt you found a deal somewhere, but here’s what I’m seeing:
That’s admittedly better than $26/TB, but I also had been looking at 20-24TB drives. That’s the other change - the lowest-$/TB (highest value) TB size is has decreased substantially (from around 20-24 in late 2025, to 10-12 now).
I bought 5 of these last September at $99 each https://ebay.us/m/x9d0kn. When I did some searching about a month ago, I found a couple for around $150 of the same model. So I paid less initially than I thought.
It’s interesting, that’s what I felt was happening, but when I looked at the charts, it seems they are less than double. Either way it feels really expensive.
I think it depends on the drive sizes, whether you accept used, and if we’re comparing bare to shuckable, but yeah, for drives that I am looking for in the 20-26TB range (new, since I don’t have enough parity/redundancy to trust used drives), it seems more like 2.5-4x cost.
Who puts an HDD into a desktop computer in 2026? For a NAS I would understand, but putting an HDD in a desktop is very uncommon nowadays, even as a secondary drive
I didn’t say desktop. But, in any case, there are plenty of reasons someone might want extra storage in their desktop without shelling out for an SSD.
I quite like the idea of people just not engaging with this.
Can’t play the latest AAA because I can’t afford the equipment for it? No worries, there’s literally thousands of other games out there.
More realistically though, people will end up subbing to a streaming service, which is almost certainly what the companies would prefer.
If you’ve got a PC built in the last few years you can play them anyway.
Mostly this affects people whose PCs are pretty old already :/ but like if you’ve got an AM4 build you can just upgrade your GPU and maybe CPU if necessary and keep your good ol’ DDR4. AM4 truly the GOAT of CPU sockets in terms of longevity.
or maybe, just maybe… You could, are you ready for this idea…?
Play on medium settings !!!GASP!!! Or worse, play it at 1080!
Idiot me bought a 4k laptop and be fucked if I’m not gonna use every single pixel on that screen (even if I can’t tell a difference between 1440 and 4k)
I mean if you’ve you hardware that needs upgrading, you aren’t playing new games at medium anymore either and your display is probably 1080p anyway.
1080 and 1440 is a pretty big difference. 1440 and 4k, not so much. Definitely agree that there’s a point with settings where you just don’t really notice the textires/reflections/etc. when you’re playing the game.
This is so true.
My PC I built has parts from as far as 12 yrs ago and day to day tasks go very smoothly especially since I switched to Linux. I haven’t bought a newly released game from a big publisher since Borderlands 3 and that ran fine. Most recent indie games still run well too.
I’m currently planning on upgrading with used parts from 2020 ish not because I need to, but because I’d like to play some games from 2010-2020 in medium-to-high graphic settings and hopefully make it last another decade.
Chasing AAA highest setting has always been an expensive hobby, but not it’s straight up luxury that only those with a lot of disposable income or make a living off gaming can afford. And honestly that’s fine because there are just so many good games out there that don’t require the specs.
I have a 16gb rx6800… playing stardew valley lol
This isn’t necessarily about games.
My mini PC only has 4GB of RAM because I thought I’d just buy it later, and “for now” if it just boots it’s fine.Stop Killing Games could play neatly into this, fingers crossed.
Upgraded my homelab with 256GB right before the prices went nuts. Lucky me.
But before I bought the best GPU at the time for absolute peak-price, adamant it would rise further and never going back.
So…universe equalized for me. For now.
As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.
Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You’re likely to get more for your money.
If you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don’t have prices driven by memory price.
I’m really focusing on saving up for some stickers with flames on them, that’ll speed it up as much as I can afford for a while
Have you tried speed holes? They make it go faster.
Make sure that they are red. That would make the PC become 3x faster.
Damn this is a hot tip!
2028? You’re quite the optimist.
Don’t worry, China is about to flood the market. Don’t buy RAM yet, wait for the prices to normalize first.
Don’t be too hopeful. China will first fill their demand
Which will impact the demand world-wide, because China’s demand also takes from that either way.
Definitely, but they also won’t miss the opportunity to become a major actor in the industry globally. Contrary to the US, they have in the past decade made a lot of moves to establish their influence globally.
What if they decide to just keep their rare earth metals for themselves and control the entire market?
They already announced they are mass producing RAM and are going to export. So the market is going to be flooded.
I’m saying they could corner the market on components they can manufacture by banning export of the raw resources they control. Threatening rare earth metal exports was how they got Trump to heel.
Sinking the market for all the hardware hoarders is a good counter too. I’m fairly convinced that this move isn’t just about AI, but consolidation of resources into Cloud services that lets them squeeze out competitors and force consumers and businesses alike into a perpetual-rent model. AI is just a convenient way to allocate the money to corner the market
that’d be based
Any day now ™
Aug 2024, I purchased 32gb of RAM for $109. That same kit today would cost me $509. Sept 2025 I got a 250gb nvme for $33 that is now around $85. The inflation is real.
Not inflation, just artificial shortage
oh you kids…let me tell ya how much RAM was in the late 90s…
I appreciate the fact that this is a still gif (good compression!), but it has several frames with differing compression artifacts for no good reason.
still gifs have good compression? I recall that motion gifs are notorious for large file sizes, but are still gifs the opposite?
It’s been a while since I learned this but yeah we were taught it significantly reduces images in size, though in quality too (mostly because of the 256 colors limit, otherwise it is technically lossless IIRC). PNG results in slightly smaller files with much better colors and alpha channels so yeah by comparison gif isn’t that good, but to be fair, PNG was created as a direct improvement over gifs for single images compression/encoding, and quite some time later too.
Adding to that, video encoding and compression algorithms have gone so far now that encoding basically any video longer than a few frames as a gif is a waste, but that’s because these hardly store any actual still frame IIRC, it’s mostly codecs-based wizardry which, for a simple explanation, can cheaply encode several frames by basically saying “this whole area stays the same color for X frames” and even moving blobs of pixels across multiple frames, whereas gifs, by design, store each individual frame making up the video.
Interesting, I didn’t realize still gif was lossless, I was thinking in comparison to lossy formats like jpg.
Ditto, thought 64 would’ve been overkill at that point…
The inflation is real.
109 USD in August 2024 is equivalent in buying power to $115.31 today. $33 from September 2025, adjusted for inflation, would be about $33.84 today.
This has absolutely nothing to do with inflation
The inflation of computer component costs, the topic of this post.
Fair enough, you could say the prices are “inflated”. There’s a big difference though between inflation as the devaluation of currency that’s been slowly happening “forever” and inflation in the sense of a guy selling shit simply racking up his prices and putting the surplus in his greedy little pockets. Of course you can choose to use the exact same word for both cases if you wish
It wasn’t the best word choice. I did say ‘the’ inflation to try and separate it a bit, but should have rephrased.
Going back to the 90s when a few megabytes was hundreds of dollars.
That’d be great if software still had the same small footprint it had back then.
We added 4 megs to our 486 and it was $80 a meg so $320 for the upgrade. That was back when hard drives where a little over a dollar per meg.
Are you sure about hard drives at $1 per meg at that time?
It sounds way to cheap.Yes, you are probably right. I think I am thinking of when I built my Pentium 100 and it was $360 for a 360 meg hard drive.
Or 80s, where it was kilobytes.
Purchased May 6, 2024
I paid $158.99 in November of 2024, building my TrueNAS server. Wish I’d doubled up back then.
I got four 16gb sticks with intent to take two for my nas setup. Now I feel like I want the 64 for my main rig exclusively, and then 32 for my nas on the side.
I did score on HDDs during Black Friday tho
HDDs are another regret of mine, along with trying to save a bunch by opting against a chassis with hot swap. I went with four 10TB Red Plus drives. That ended up being about 26TB actual in a RAIDZ1. I failed to consider just how quickly I would start filling it between archiving some YouTube videos and taking DVDs and BluRays out on loan from the local library.
If prices ever improve I’m tempted to get at least a 12 bay, switch to RAIDZ2, and up the number of drives to start with. After migration I’ll probably repurpose the old chassis to be a dedicated NVR. Something lower power that hopefully won’t have to shut off right away if there’s a power outage. As it stands when the lights go out so does TrueNAS and 98% of what I host.
That’s the dream, anyway. Time will tell if it pans out.
Basically we will be buying computer parts in specific decades, like this decade is bad for anything memory, last was bad for anything GPU. Next will be bad for, I don’t know, screens or mobos. And so on.
Next decade you’ll be running Linux on Windows Portal hacked to run Linux instead of a dumbed down Windows to rent PC from Azure.
Calm down Satan
I bought 96 gigs of DDR3 for my server in December 2022. It cost $118.76; less than $1.24 per gig.
My CostCo is selling a gaming PC for $1,300, with 64gb of DDR5 and a RTX 5060. If that is a decent deal, go pick one up before the oil shocks start to really hit.
Depends on other things as well. It could be a decent deal but a pre built PC rarely is, even pre covid.
I like to go to the nearby shop and pay the guy to put one together for me. I don’t know nearly enough to keep up with the industry, so I’ll defer to expertise.
I always go for a custom build myself. Got a Thor NAS chassis, I am just waiting for de-dollarization and the AI bubble to pop, so that I can use my Euros to build a top-shelf PC. Debating whether to pick up the motherboard now, since that is more unique component that can potentially stop being available. A Threadripper CPU and the RAM would be more generic.
Honestly I might go for that Costco deal just for the RAM.
it’s going to be have like the slowest frequency a DDR5 can have but at current prices, getting your hands on one is already good enough.
Yeah. I actually started building a PC just this week? The timing is horrid, but I felt like, is it actually going to get better? When does that happen in my life?
Anyway. The RAM I ended up with cost a significant fraction of the GPU. It’s all ballsed up. At least it isn’t covered in stupid LEDs. I bought the cheapest 32gb DDR5 I could find and still spent like £400. All I can say is that Outlook had better run so good that I don’t wonder what £400 of cocaine would have been like instead.
On a side note: Who ever thought that those led lights on memory sticks was a good idea? I brought 128 GB right before memory prices went insane, lucky me, but the modules have led lights (the store was out of the normal ones)
My computer now looks like a tacky circus and I can’t turn it off, I can’t find bios options to disable it
The people that are hyping AI are real quiet in this thread.
Devs just need to optimize their software. My i5 750 still works just fine with a 1060 and 16gb ram. Their’s thousand of great games to play, fuck the aaa.
Nah. Fuck AI companies causing the shortage. They should stop delaying the inevitable bubble crash and suffer real consequences.
I mean sure, fuck all those AI business. But the idea that we always need more powerful hardware is a consumerism illusion.
I agree but also this shit is also affecting people who may just need replacement part or in my case just need an SSD so I can see about converting my old PC into a nomad.
1gb of ram costs more than 1 hour of minimum wage
