- RAM price hikes are now worrying among retailers
- Some RAM kits cost double or more than triple what they cost just a few months ago.
- This could have a knock-on effect on the Steam Machine, but rumor has it that Sony has played it smart by increasing the amount of RAM for its console.
There’s a new barometer for memory pricing, and it’s a worrying one: comparing the cost of a DDR5 RAM kit for a PC to the price of a PS5 to show how ridiculously expensive system memory has become.
Tom’s Hardware noticed that at Newegg in the US there is a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64GB RAM kit (a pair of 32GB modules) on sale currently for $580, with a discount and promo code bringing it down by $640, the full asking price.
It’s almost as expensive as the PS5 Pro with its best discount at the time of writing in the US: the console is priced at $649 at Walmart.
Let’s look at it for a moment: This 64GB of RAM kit costs just $69 (just over 10%) less than a brand new PS5 Pro console (which has 18GB of RAM, admittedly mostly video memory, but it’s still there, alongside 2TB of storage, in terms of all the memory inside Sony’s device).
Sure, you can get DDR5 RAM cheaper than the G.Skill kit promoted in the US, but not that much. The cheapest deal I can see (again, at the time of publishing this article) is a Crucial 64GB kit for $510. If we want to compare this to the base PS5 console, at $399 on sale now, the system RAM is 28% more expensive, or almost a third more.
How did we get here in the world of RAM? These are of course those memory price hikes that we’ve been hearing so much about for some time, and now we’re seeing the full force of these supply issues.
As Tom points out, based on price tracking data, this 64GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RAM kit, which now costs $640 for its full asking price, could be had for around $210 (sometimes) in the few months leading up to October 2025, before this new memory price spike. It was $220 as recently as the end of September, and now the price has almost tripled.
If we look at the Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB kit (2 x 32GB modules), it currently costs $537 on Amazon US, while if we look at the six-month price history on CamelCamelCamel, it was sometimes $145 in July and August 2025 – and it was around $150 to $160 from June through most of September.
Take a slightly more modest 32GB kit – which is now the base level of memory for a new gaming PC in terms of future-proofing – and the picture remains bleak. A Crucial Pro DDR5 32GB kit (2 x 16GB modules) now costs $301 on Amazon US, three-quarters of the asking price of the base PS5. Wind the clock back to October 21, and this same kit was $175 according to CamelCamelCamel – a 70% price increase in the span of just over a month.
It’s an equally frightening picture elsewhere, such as in the UK, where a 64GB (2 x 32GB) Crucial Pro DDR5 kit that cost £170 for the past six months has just jumped to £299 after the first week of November. It’s not as bad as in the United States, but it’s still a pretty staggering increase.
Analysis: Is the dream of a steam engine crumbling at the seams?
This increase in the price of RAM is therefore very bad news, and it is also very worrying for the box of gaming tricks recently revealed by Valve for the show. For what? Because the memory shortage will drive up the price of system RAM and storage for the Steam Machine, which could potentially interfere with Valve’s plan to keep the mini PC relatively affordable.
But it’s when you see how bad this RAM crisis has become that you realize that it’s starting to look like, well, just that – a crisis – and that it could have a negative impact on the price of the Steam Machine. Yes, okay, we’re going too far and entering the realm of speculation, but I think it’s a real concern.
There is also an additional difficulty here. Keep in mind that I’ve already said that the broader PC and console market is also going to be buffeted by these strong memory headwinds, and so in theory the Steam Machine should still remain relatively affordable compared to other hardware.
However, what I didn’t realize is that according to new rumors (add major caveat now), Sony has been smart here and stocked up on a large quantity of RAM modules for the PS5. We’re told that in the short to medium term, Sony is good at RAM supply and its consoles won’t be affected by memory-related pricing challenges, but the Xbox might be. And of course, Valve’s Steam Machine will most likely be affected as well.
The bottom line is that, let alone comparing PC RAM sticks to the price of the PS5, when we come to make a comparison between the base PS5 and the Steam Machine finalized next year – with memory and storage price hikes affecting the latter, but not the former – Sony could blow Valve out of the water in the value stakes.
It’s true that Valve is trying to do something different with the Steam Machine’s value proposition, as one engineer pointed out when explaining that the company wouldn’t subsidize the mini PC (like it does with consoles). And I understand that, I understand where Valve is coming from with an interesting approach to certain aspects of living room gaming, but it won’t stand up to a potential gap in the prices of these competing devices.
The best PC controllers
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
