RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders

The first few months of 2025 were full of graphics card reviews where we generally came away impressed with performance and completely at a loss on availability and pricing. The testing in these reviews is useful regardless, but when it came to extra buying advice, the best we could do was to compare Nvidia’s imaginary pricing to AMD’s imaginary pricing and wait for availability to improve. Now, as the year winds down, we’re facing price spikes for memory and storage that are unlike anything I’ve seen in two decades of pricing out PC parts. Pricing for most RAM kits has increased dramatically since this summer, driven by overwhelming demand for these parts in AI data centers. Depending on what you’re building, it’s now very possible that the memory could be the single most expensive component you buy; things are even worse now than they were the last time we compared prices a few weeks ago . Component Aug. 2025 price Nov. 2025 price Dec. 2025 price Patriot Viper Venom 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR-6000 $49 $110 $189 Western Digital WD Blue SN5000 500GB $45 $69 $135 * $190 * Some SSDs are getting to the point where they’re twice as expensive as they were this summer (for this comparison, I’ve swapped the newer WD Blue SN5100 pricing in for the SN5000, since the drive is both newer and slightly cheaper as of this writing). Some RAM kits, meanwhile, are around four times as expensive as they were in August. Yeesh. And as bad as things are, the outlook for the immediate future isn’t great. Memory manufacturer Micron-which is pulling its Crucial-branded RAM and storage products from the market entirely in part because of these shortages- predicted in a recent earnings call that supply constraints would “persist beyond calendar 2026.” Kingston executives believe prices will continue to rise through next year. PR representatives at GPU manufacturer Sapphire believe prices will “stabilize,” albeit at a higher level than people might like.

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