- RAM price increases now worryingly strong for retailers
- Some RAM kits cost double or almost triple what they were just a couple of months ago.
- This could have a knock-on effect on the Steam Machine, but Sony is rumored to have been smart by increasing the RAM supply for its console.
There’s a new barometer for memory price, and it’s disturbing: that is, 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 noted that on Newegg in the US, there is a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64GB RAM kit (a pair of 32GB modules) on sale for $580 currently, with a discount and promo code bringing it down from $640, which is the full retail 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 break that down for a moment: That 64GB RAM kit costs just $69 (just over 10%) less than a shiny new PS5 Pro console (which has 18GB of RAM, admittedly mostly video memory, but still, it’s there, along with 2TB of storage, in terms of all the memory inside Sony’s device).
Of course, you can get DDR5 RAM cheaper than the G.Skill kit featured in the US, but not by that much. The cheapest deal I can see (again, at the time of posting this) is a 64GB Crucial kit for $510. If we want to compare that to the base PS5 console, at $399 on sale currently, the system RAM is 28% more expensive, almost a third more.
How did this come about in the world of RAM? These are, of course, those memory price increases we’ve been hearing so much about for some time, and now we’re witnessing the full force of those supply issues.
As Tom’s points out, based on price tracking data, that G.Skill Trident Z5 64GB RAM kit, which now costs $640 at full retail price, could be had for around $210 (sometimes) in the few months leading up to October 2025, before this new memory price hike begins. It was $220 at the end of September, and now the price has come close to tripling.
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 back at the six-month price history on CamelCamelCamel, it was at times $145 in July and August 2025, and has been between $150 and $160 from June through most of September.
Take a slightly more modest 32GB kit, which is now the entry-level memory level for a new gaming PC in terms of future-proofing, and the outlook remains bleak. A 32GB Crucial Pro DDR5 kit (2 x 16GB modules) is now $301 on Amazon US, three-quarters of the starting price of the base PS5. Rewind the clock to October 21, and that same kit was $175 according to CamelCamelCamel – a 70% price increase in the space of just over a month.
It’s an equally scary picture elsewhere, such as in the UK, where a Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB (2 x 32GB) kit that has cost £170 over the past six months shot up 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 Steam Machine dream falling apart?
So this increase in RAM price is very bad news, and it’s also very worrying for Valve’s newly revealed box of gaming tricks for the living room. Because? Because the memory shortage will increase the price of the Steam Machine’s system RAM and storage, potentially interfering with Valve’s plan to keep the mini PC relatively affordable.
But when you see how bad this RAM crisis has become, you realize that it’s starting to look like, well, just that, a crisis, and it could have a nasty impact on the price of the Steam Machine. Yes, okay, we’re getting ahead of ourselves and entering the realm of speculation, but I think it’s a genuine concern.
There is an additional problem here as well. Note that I’ve said before that the broader PC and console market will also be affected by these strong memory headwinds, so in theory the Steam Machine should still remain at a relatively affordable level compared to other hardware.
However, what I didn’t realize is that according to new rumors (attach important caveat now), Sony has been smart about this and stockpiled a large number of RAM modules for the PS5. We’re told that in the short to medium term, Sony is good for RAM supply and as a result its consoles won’t be affected by memory-related pricing difficulties, but the Xbox might. And of course, Valve’s Steam Machine will most likely be affected as well.
The upshot is that, regardless of comparing PC RAM to the price of the PS5, when we do a comparison between the base PS5 and the finalized Steam Machine next year (with memory and storage price increases affecting the latter, but not the former), Sony could blow Valve out of the water on the stakes.
It’s true that Valve is trying to do something different with the value proposition of the Steam Machine, as one engineer highlighted when talking about the firm not subsidizing mini PCs (as happens with consoles). And I get it, I get where Valve is coming from with an interesting approach to some aspects of living room gaming, but it won’t withstand a potential chasm in price for these rival devices.
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