- The price increases of RAM are now creating concern for the dealers
- Some RAM kits are two or almost three times more expensive than they were a few months ago
- This could have had a ripple effect on the Steam Machine, but Sony would have played it smart and saved the RAM for its console.
There’s a new memory price barometer, and it’s worrying: comparing the cost of a DDR5 RAM kit for a PC to the price of a PS5 to show just how ridiculously expensive system memory has become.
Tom’s Hardware noticed that a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64GB RAM Kit (a pair of 32GB modules) is currently available from Newegg in the US, with a discount and promo code that brings the price down to $640, the full retail price.
It’s almost as expensive as the best-discounted ps5 pro in the US at the time of writing: the console costs $649 at Walmart.
Let’s think about that for a moment: the 64GB RAM package costs just $69 (roughly 10%) less than a new PS5 Pro console (which has 18GB of RAM, albeit mostly video memory, but still with 2TB of storage, based on the total storage of the Sony device).
Sure, in the US you can get DDR5 RAM for less than the G.Skill kit shown, but not by much. The cheapest deal I can see (again, at the time of this writing) is a 64GB Crucial kit for $510. Compared to the base console PS5, which currently sells for $399, the system memory costs 28% more, or almost a third more.
How did this end up in the world of RAM? Of course, it’s the rising prices of storage devices that we’ve been hearing so much about for a while, and now we’re seeing the full force of this supply shortage.
As Tom notes based on pricing data, the G.Skill Trident Z5 64GB RAM kit, now fully priced at $640, could be had for around $210 (sometimes) in the few months until October 2025, before this new memory price hike begins. At the end of September the price was 220 dollars and now it has almost tripled.
As for the Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB kit (2 x 32GB modules), this is currently the case $537 on Amazon in the USwhile if we look at CamelCamelCamel’s six-month price history, it was sometimes $145 in July and August 2025, and between $150 and $160 from June through most of September.
Take a slightly more modest 32GB package, which now represents the base memory level of a new gaming PC in terms of future protection, and the outlook remains bleak. A 32GB Crucial Pro DDR5 kit (2 x 16GB modules) is now available. $301 on Amazon in the USthree quarters of the starting price of the base PS5. Turn back the clock to October 21st and according to CamelCamelCamel, the same kit costs $175, a 70% price increase in just over a month.
The situation is equally dire elsewhere, such as in the UK, where a Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB (2 x 32GB) kit that cost £170 for the last six months rose to £299 after the first week of November. It’s not as bad as in the US, but it’s still a pretty staggering increase.
Analysis: The dream of a steam engine explosion?
This increase in the price of RAM is therefore very bad news, and it is also very worrying for Valve’s new lounge gaming advice box. Before then? In fact, the memory shortage will increase the price of the Steam Machine’s system RAM and storage, which could hurt Valve’s plan to keep the mini PC relatively affordable.
But when you see how bad this RAM crisis has gotten, you realize that it is just that: a crisis, and it could have disastrous consequences for the price of the Steam Machine. Yeah, okay, we’re getting into the realm of speculation, but I think it’s a real concern.
There is also another problem here. Note that I’ve already said that the wider PC and console markets will also be affected by these serious storage issues, so in theory the Steam Machine should remain relatively affordable compared to other hardware.
What I didn’t know though is that according to recent rumors (and this is an important caveat), Sony was smart and stockpiled a lot of RAM modules for the PS5. We’re told Sony is good at supplying RAM in the short to medium term so its consoles won’t suffer from memory-related pricing issues, but the xbox could be affected. And of course, Valve’s steam engine will most likely be affected as well.
The bottom line is that if we were to do a comparison next year between the base PS5 and the finished Steam Machine (with memory and storage price increases affecting the latter, but not the former), Sony could throw Valve off balance in terms of value, not to mention comparing PC RAM to PS5 price.
In fact, Valve is trying to do something different with the Steam Machine’s value proposition, as one engineer noted when he explained that the company would not subsidize the mini-PC (as it does with consoles). And I get it, I get where Valve is coming from with an interesting approach to certain aspects of arcade gaming, but it can’t compete with a potential price difference with these competing units.