Consumer Hardware Pricing

Pre-built gaming PCs now competitive with DIY due to bulk purchasing, component price volatility making individual builds less attractive, RAM appreciating in value

The traditional DIY PC building ethos is being upended as extreme market volatility and the bulk-purchasing power of major retailers make pre-built systems a surprisingly more economical choice than sourcing individual components. Enthusiasts are particularly frustrated by a perceived "Reverse-Moore's Law," noting that modern, expensive GPUs often provide lower memory throughput than flagship cards from five years ago as manufacturers prioritize computational power over memory bandwidth. This pricing crisis is further exacerbated by insatiable demand from AI hyperscalers and a cautious manufacturing sector intent on limiting supply to maintain high profit margins. Consequently, hardware like RAM has transformed into a surreal appreciating asset, leading some users to realize that their aging, used components are now worth more than the day they were originally purchased.

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The Radeon VII came out in 2019 as a $700 consumer GPU with an 1TB/s HBM2 memory subsystem which is more than any consumer GPU you can get today, including the high-end ones afaik. At that point in time, there was a whole lineup of AMD GPUs with HBM going down into the midrange.

If they could make this stuff and sell it to regular people a decade ago for very palatable prices, why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

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> why do they come up with the idea that this is the technology of the gods, unaffordable by mere mortals?

because the gods want it all and are willing to pay top dollar.

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I have been wondering this recently. It was the convention that if you wanted to keep costs down, try to keep the memory bus size down as low as possible. Still remember the awful Radeon 9200 SE - 64bit data bus that strangled an already slow GPU.

Heck, I have a phone with a 16bit memory bus for instance. The high(ish) clock rate only makes up the difference slightly.

But with general prices on all components going up, it might not be such a big factor any more.

HBM migght make sense for higher end products which can free up space for the lower end that will never use the tech.

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5090 is an overpriced outlier. A typical consumer GPU, like RTX 5070, has a 3-times lower memory throughput.

Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive.

The memory throughput of GPUs per dollar has regressed greatly during the last 5 years, despite the fact that the widths of the GPU memory interfaces have been reduced, in order to decrease the production costs.

RTX 5080 has a 256-bit memory interface, while the much cheaper Radeon VII had an 1024-bit memory interface. RTX 5080 has almost 4-times faster memories than Radeon VII, but it has not used this to increase the memory throughput, but only to reduce the production costs, while simultaneously increasing the product price.

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> Even a RTX 5080 has a lower memory throughput than a Radeon VII from 2019, 7 years ago, while being much more expensive.

And it's faster for gaming, I guess? Which is what matters for the typical user.

Anyway you can buy much faster GPUs now than in 2019. They are also much more expensive, yes.

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Modern GPUs like RTX 5080 are much faster for the applications that are limited by computational capabilities, mainly because they have more execution units, whose clock frequencies have also increased.

I suppose that most games are limited by computation, so they are indeed much faster on modern GPUs.

However, there are applications that are limited by memory throughput, not by computation, including AI inference and many scientific/technical computing applications.

For such applications, old GPUs with higher memory throughput are still faster.

This is why I am still using an old Radeon VII and a couple of other ancient AMD GPUs with high memory throughput.

Last year I have bought an Intel GPU, which is still slower than my old GPUs, but it at least had very good performance per dollar, competitive with that of the old GPUs, because it was very cheap, while the current AMD and especially NVIDIA GPUs have poor performance per dollar.

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then it must be the case you can't get one (for a fair price?)

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Define "fair price"

5090s are certainly expensive compared to most other GPUs, but not expensive enough to be unobtanium for nearly any professional who could utilize one as part of their job

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Hell, some of us utilize them just to play video games!

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You're saying this in a world where AMD's highest end consumer GPU in 2026 is also limited to 16 GB.

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this card is 4 years old, it's not on store shelves anymore.

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FWIW that depends on the stores you're looking at. There are three models from different manufacturers available here in a few shops. The prices are a bit ouchier than what i paid for mine around Christmas 2024 though (i got mine on a sale).

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You can still get "new" ones on amazon in europe.

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7900XT has 20GB and you can still get some unused ones.

R9700 has 32GB and is cheaper than most NVidia consumer GPUs, even though it's a "pro".

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And I can still buy a new W7800 48GB for a relatively decent price.

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After NVIDIA essentially removed FP64 from consumer GPUs (their 1:64 performance ratio is worse than what you can obtain by software emulation, so it is useless, except for testing programs intended to run on datacenter GPUs), AMD persisted for a few years, but then they also followed NVIDIA.

AMD Hawaii GPUs still had 1:2 FP64:FP32, while the consumer variant of Radeon VII dropped to 1:4. The following AMD consumer GPUs dropped the FP64 performance to levels that are not competitive with CPUs.

Nowadays the only consumer GPUs with decent FP64 performance are the Intel Battlemage GPUs, which have a 1:8 performance ratio, which provides very good performance per dollar.

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But wouldn’t you rather hbm prices come down first ? Memory makers will be fine. There is practically infinite demand.
Unless you get china style rationing of compute per person world wide.

The real issue is everyone wanting to upgrade to hbm, ddr5, and nvme5 at the same time.

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Not a rec, but just my source: Atrioc (streamer, YouTuber) is good at gathering all the facts for the rest of us. There's many other things in play, like the Strait of Hormuz (helium, bromine). Ultimately it works out that the shortage, and shortage profits, will continue; the chip makers are probably going to continue to see record profits (as Samsung has).

The specific mix of factors could change at any time, but the supply chain is relatively inelastic, it will take some time to show up on price labels.

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Exactly, that's why they are not building more capacity and that's why RAM prices will stay up for years.

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The market is already stagnated. Even if OpenAI doesn’t buy what they reserved other players will do so. SK Hynix CEO said there is a 20% gap between supply and demand per year. And that doesn’t account the shock effect that will take place the moment prices normalize and everyone and their dog will go out and start buying inventory to avoid the next crisis. I for one would certainly buy more than I currently need just in case.

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I think:
s/stagnated/saturated/

Edit: also, that demand pressure is going to be applied constantly; there isn’t going to be a shock, it’s just going to keep prices high longer.

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Well if that hotel was then able to sell the other half of hotel rooms for 10x the old price. Then the hotel might actually be happy as they can now charge 10x for the other half or slowly lower prices back down over years.

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This will result in demand destruction which will starve the enterprise which will starve the hyperscaler. theres no situation where people not being able to afford hardware for 4 years results in the bubble not popping

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I'd expect unaffordable hardware to drive demand for thin clients connected to cloud services which is something that had already been happening gradually prior to this.

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So the ML hate is weaponized in the form of memory demand collapse FUD, and the public at large has to pay through their nose for it... thanks party poopers!

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I don't think its from the ML collapse FUD, its most likely from the multiple time's in the past when they overbuilt and it resulted in a memory oversupply and price collapses. The 1985–1988, 1993–1994, 1998–2002 and the post pandemic oversupply. These were all cases where shortages followed by over corrections caused oversupply, financial losses due to low prices and fewer surviving companies. I think they're taking their time and are cautiously adding more capacity in such a way that prices won't end up collapsing again. Regardless, the result is still that we the consumers have to pay more.

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As an aside, recently I wanted to refresh my gaming PC, but the price shock and general lack of availability of buying components individually made it seem hardly worth it, so I just kept deferring the project.

Then, mostly by chance, I saw that my local Microcenter had some pre-builts for sale, and I ended up picking one up for <$5k that had "best in slot" components across the board, including a 5090 and even a high-end power supply.

The last time I built a gaming PC was upwards of a decade ago, and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built unless you had a massive amount of disposable income and couldn't spare even just one weekend to dedicate to a hobby project that could benefit you for years. Now, it was absolutely a no-brainer.

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> I ended up picking one up for <$5k

I'm struggling to put this in context. For comparison, what was your budget for refreshing the pc you had? Were the planned upgrades going to exceed $5k at current prices? Or is the situation that a pre-build machine with far better components was now only marginally more?

Or is it that pre-built gaming PCs have stopped being a joke? I had the experience building a bicycle: I was certain I was taking the frugal path sourcing each component individually and putting it together myself. At the end I was horrified to realize I spent far more than a new bike with superior components. It was pointed out that bicycle makers are buying by the pallet and will beat diy every time — so long as they're building something I want to buy.

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I did the exact same thing during Covid, the prebuilt ended up being ~20% cheaper than buying the individual components (I needed a full upgrade). Maybe a little less since I could have reused my case.

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> and at that time the prevailing wisdom was to never buy a pre-built

That's still the case, and always will be — with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline.

Beyond that, the chance they've chosen good components and haven't tried to screw you over on less flashy ones like the motherboard and power supply is low.

That's not to say it's literally impossible to ever find a good deal. You very well might have. Doesn't change anything though.

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> with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline

Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?

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I believe this is exactly what's going on -- they're buying parts in bulk, often months in advance, and locking in deals that a single consumer can't easily go get on the open market right now.

Hardware pricing and availabilty pre-COVID was pretty predictable and stable, which meant the consumer could extract a meaningful cost advantage if they were willing to do the relatively modest amount of work of sourcing components individually and personally assembling the build. Right now, though, some places like Microcenter appear to have a cost advantage that fundamentally relies on market and pricing instability and can only be achieved through deeper integration with the supply chain and bulk purchasing in advance -- something a retailer like Microcenter can do, but I personally cannot.

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It will last forever. After covid, all manufacturers understood the value of limiting supply and extracting profits. Cars used to super cheap before covid, they will never go back to the same levels.

From now on, RAM will always be super costly for consumers, because they can't make massive deals like Apple/OpenAI/etc. We are the bagholders.

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>> Cars used to super cheap before covid

Have they really ever been cheap? Also Tesla 3 is cheaper now, Yaris is still cheap as well.

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if a shortage lasts years, it's not a shortage. "The market clearing price of RAM in the face of expected sustained healthy demand should lead to a stable market for years."

even if gaming is and will remain very popular for years, it and the desire to upgrade gaming rigs is still a discretionary activity with more price elasticity of demand than corporate uses for RAM in the dawn of the AI age. gamers live on the margin of this market, where low prices will stimulate upgrades and high prices will lead to holding out. The complaints about price are real, but that segment of the market is some combination of less large and less important.

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It’s not merely a “gaming vs data center“. There’s so many other places DRAM and NVM are needed - mobile, automotive, other consumer electronics,… the current situation is that _all_ of that is deprived of the memory that it needs. And much of this is critical to the real economy.

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Why are you only talking about gamers? Apple, the most cautious planners in the whole industry have straight up cancelled their 512gb RAM Mac Studio. Don’t ask; they won’t sell you one.

Everybody’s getting pinched, not just the gamers.

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let the analyst and news say what they want - the entire situation is artificial and is up to the manufacturers.

the current relative spike in the prices misses the medium-term trend of the vast decrease in memory price post-covid that led to the recent surge. the cartel got another opportunity to make bank and they will use that lever to the max.

funnily enough i've been personally stuck with 16 gigs since 2015, across three memory generations! but i am used to the past when you would spend 80-100 on an 8gb stick (jdec timings, nothing fancy but from a major brand) without accounting for inflation.

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Hilarious, The ram in my PC i built 5 years ago is will soon be worth more than i spent on building the whole PC.

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I was about to give away my old PC, but I think it could be worth my hassle to sell it for the RAM now (64GB DDR4).

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Im thankfull for buying 16gb of RAM, but what is gonna happen in 5 years when users PCs start to fail?

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I bought a workstation with 3 TB of ram for FDTD simulations last year. Glad I got it then ...

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I just checked my gaming PC I built a few years ago with 64GB of DDR5 RAM, its actually gone up in value, that is unheard of generally.

Think I will scrap my PC and sell its parts.

I wonder if there are any niche companies building decent rigs with DDR3 and 5/6th generation Intel CPUs out there, it is cheap and might be a business opportunity?

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Sad news, I didn't buy enough RAM before....

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Are we entering the Reverse-Moore's Law era.

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