Over on the Steam Frame subreddit, the top post at the time of writing is one declaring "this sub has lost its mind". It follows this up by acknowledging that, with Valve not releasing Steam Frame preorders on July 27th as the subreddit previously thought, "Now most of the new posts are just brainrot, and I'm here for it. "

To take a step back a bit, users have suspected the Steam Frame, Valve's upcoming VR headset, is 'coming soon' for a good while now. Valve confirmed it will release this summer at some point, and with weeks left in Summer, it's likely to come out sooner rather than later. As well as this, we recently saw a new "Great on Frame" category on the Steam store, and tens of thousands of kilograms of VR headsets arrived in the US last month.

This sub has lost its mind from r/SteamFrame

Some sleuths have noted that Valve tends to announce on Mondays or Thursdays and also noted that it would make sense to launch Steam Frame preorders in between Steam Fests so it isn't fighting for banner space on the Steam home page. That left them with the conclusion that Valve would announce preorders on July 9th or July 27th. Naturally, when it wasn't announced on July 9th, July 27th became the last hope for a July release. But the Steam Sale launch theory doesn't make much sense, as the Steam Controller seemed to have been announced and released during a Steam Fest.

There was, however, one more anticipated release date in between. Last week, one X user reported on an unverified screenshot claiming that the Steam Frame rollout would begin on July 24. The Steam Frame subreddit was pretty sceptical of this claim, but it still became a point of conversation and hope for some.

Over the entirety of July, users have been posting prayers, pleas, and potatoes of luck (don't ask), in the hope that Valve would randomly announce the release date with little fanfare. As you might be able to guess, that hasn't happened. However, the months of anticipation have gotten to the subreddit, and now users are using that as a chance to post just whatever they feel like, including gibberish and a whole pile of memes.

The tomfoolery of the Steam Frame subreddit has made its way over to the main Steam subreddit, where one post asks, "What’s currently going on in r/steamframe." Yeah, I don't really know either, but it's fun to watch.

I got a strange message in the mail today, I think it’s a sign we’re getting the frame tomorrow. from r/SteamFrame

One comment says, "We've all collectively lost our minds. I sold my damn Quest 3 months ago for this thing, I'm jonesin' for some VR."

But there's a deeper meaning behind some of this anticipation. The Steam Machine launched at a very high price point, so high in fact that Valve told us it wished it could sell the Machine for less. And Qualcomm has said it is planning to raise the price of its chips on September 1 (The Frame uses a Qualcomm chip), so some are worried that the Frame will be prohibitively expensive, and that's before mentioning the 16 GB of LPDDR5X RAM in it.

If it launches right now, it would be launching before the Qualcomm price raise comes into effect. Naturally, one can assume that Valve has a stockpile of headsets ready to go for launch, and presumably contracts of supply in place, though that wouldn't stop it from raising the price further down the line should it need to.

Many of those preordering a Steam Frame are preparing for the pain of that price, so they might as well get it out of the way early. And, obviously, the sooner the preorder, the sooner users will actually have their hands on the device.

But hey, maybe Valve will actually announce it today. It has no reason to do so, but that's never stopped anyone from hoping.

If you've been keeping up to date with news of the raging memory supply crisis, then I don't need to tell you how the AI industry's seemingly bottomless hunger for both system storage and RAM has significantly raised prices. Well, it turns out it can get worse than runaway costs, as manufacturers are even more concerned about securing supply, period.

Apacer CEO C.K. Chang recently warned that memory shortages are expected to remain severe throughout 2026. He recently explained that securing supply is a bigger operational risk to Apacer now than paying high costs, as he expects memory manufacturers will release about 30% of their 2026 supply volume in 2027 (via DigiTimes).

Chang clarified that next year's limited supply won't be due to a fundamental shift in the market's structure. Still, in order to guard against such a shortfall, Apacer will attempt to secure as much inventory as it possibly can now. At the end of the 2026's first half, Apacer already held about $383 million worth of inventory.

Many other consumer electronics companies are already thinking along similar lines, securing multi-year supply contracts and further ensuring the memory shortage won't ease in the near term. In such a challenging supply landscape, the Phison CEO's prediction that many consumer electronics manufacturers 'will go bankrupt or exit product lines' by the end of this year seems increasingly likely to come to pass.

We already knew DRAM was especially hard hit by the supply crisis, but according to DigiTimes, it's estimated that about 60% of all DRAM capacity is now geared towards server-related applications, IE data centres. Chang observes that DDR5 RDIMM server modules in particular have seen the most significant price increases—and will likely continue to spike.

A potential silver lining is that the rate of price increases from memory suppliers is predicted to slow as actual supply dwindles. I say 'potential' because it may look a little silver if you tilt your head and squint. But anyway, what does that mean for us PC gamers?

Uh, not good news, I'm afraid. RAM and system storage won't just continue to be pricey; it may also become tougher to find. Some regular folks may be willing to pay higher prices for consumer memory (you can take a peek for yourself at some of the best SSD deals right here), but demand from the sector overall is considered 'weak' right now. Unfortunately, the AI industry and other enterprise customers seem only too happy to pick up the slack.

Two people have been arrested by Chinese police for allegedly staying at esports hotels for the sole purpose of stealing memory from rigs. Yeah, I was unfamiliar with esports hotels too.

Initially, Li worked alone, staying at a hotel in Shihezi City, according to Guangming Online (via Tom's Hardware). With the memory crisis in full swing, RAM is in high demand and therefore very expensive. That's especially true for memory that you would stick into a gaming PC.

After stealing from one esports hotel alone, Li allegedly recruited Cheng, and the two stayed at different hotels from May 15 to May 31, dismantling PCs as they went.

The pair reportedly listed the memory on a second-hand trading platform, and allegedly made a profit of 13,200 yuan (just shy of $2,000) from 16 sticks total. Memory could further become a target for theft as it's light and easy to conceal, and with AI sucking it all up, its prices have continued to rise over the last few years. Arguably, it offers the best gram/cost ratio out of any part of a PC right now.

Reportedly, guests noticed that PCs weren't working after Li and Cheng's stays, so the esports hotels reported the missing memory to the police, who subsequently caught the pair. Guangming Online claims that the pair's "disassembly methods" and "stories for selling stolen goods" were the evidence needed to catch them.

Though Li and Cheng have been arrested, they are currently just under criminal detention and not considered guilty without a more substantial investigation. With memory only continuing to skyrocket, and no end in sight for the crisis, it seems likely thieves will continue yoinking memory from rigs.

Memory is not the only industry that has become more profitable to steal from in the wake of the explosion of AI. Earlier this month, cargo thieves made off with over $1 million worth of copper and equipment from data centers. All of that product was hidden in two vehicles in a truck yard.

AI's hunger for both power and memory, plus the resulting supply crisis of the latter, has led to many industry players engaging in a spot of creative problem solving. Case in point, Micron and Meta have collaborated on an experimental data centre roll out of low power DRAM.

Micron has developed SOCAMM2, a fresh form factor for LPDDR5X that is a "modular, serviceable module designed for servers." Testing used "Meta’s open-source DCPerf benchmark suite, which reflects production environments across a hyperscale fleet," and found that this low-power DRAM module "consumes approximately one-third the power of DDR5." According to Micron's white paper report, that accounts for under 7% of total system power.

The white paper goes on to elaborate that LPDDR5X's "reduced operating voltage and advanced signalling allows bandwidth to scale without a corresponding rise in power consumption, resulting in better bandwidth-per-watt performance than conventional server memory." Basically, data centres can install more low power DRAM without also hiking up power-related operating costs.

The AI industry potentially switching away from DDR5 may sound like good news in the short term for memory-starved PC gamers, but the full picture is a little more complex. For one thing, ramping up production of low power DRAM will likely divert already stretched resources away from DDR5 manufacturing, leaving PC gamers in largely the same position. For another, low power DRAM tends to be used in mobile devices like phones and tablets, so consumers could still feel the pinch there.

It's worth noting we have seen low power DRAM in at least one laptop, specifically in the form of LPCAMM2 memory modules in the Framework 13 Pro at Computex. However, the memory supply crisis likely means we won't see similar low power modules in many more laptops for the foreseeable.

Speaking of the memory shortage, there's little incentive for the AI industry to do anything other than use these developments in low power DRAM to continue to scale up, not slow down. Especially as Micron's white paper found that installing more low power DRAM modules "eliminated disk spilling in [the benchmark], delivering a dramatic speedup."

I also find it hard to not feel a smidge cynical about any power efficiency news coming out of the AI sector.

Previously, Google claimed Gemini sips a mere 'five drops' of water per text prompt, and OpenAI's Sam Altman said that a single ChatGPT query uses ‘one 15th of a teaspoon’ of water—but these are not meaningful metrics when it comes to, say, the industry's overall water consumption.

Similarly, there's no ignoring just how much power major players use, with analysts claiming Google's electricity consumption 'flipping from linear to exponential growth' over the last two years. So low-power DRAM for AI workloads is all well and good, but what will that mean in terms of environmental impact, and for the climate? Not to mention whether I'll be able to find two sticks of memory to rub together for a reasonable price in the near future.

On Monday, Chinese memory manufacturer CXMT made its initial public offering on Shanghai's STAR stock market. This debut was the biggest in Asia this year, raising $8.6 billion and seeing shares in the company surge by 466%. In terms of valuation, that places CXMT right at the top of China's stock market.

CXMT's market capitalisation is now about $487.73 billion. Major player Tencent still outpaces it at a little over $500 billion, but that makes CXMT's stock market debut no less show-stealing. In fact, according to Reuters, the memory manufacturer is now a more valuable listed company than even the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Even before this news, CXMT was already one to watch; the company's plans to massively ramp up DRAM manufacturing capacity in the midst of the RAMpocalypse has made its products an appealing option for a number of PC component makers. Furthermore, recent reports suggest that CXMT is planning to expand overseas into the US market at some point in the future.

CXMT's rise may be far from unstoppable, though. Trinity Synergy Investments' hedge fund manager Yuan Yuwei told Reuters, "The stock is too ‌expensive and smells ⁠of speculation."

CXMT's stock closed at 49 yuan, after reaching an intraday high of 55.03 yuan. Compared to the stock's sale price of 8.66 yuan per share, that's a sharp uptick. This appetite is unsurprising during these times of memory shortage. But given the current supply crisis is being fuelled by outsized demand from the AI industry, it's hard not to wonder whether this excitement will find itself confined to a bubble. Yuwei went on to add, "It's hard to say the optimism is sustainable."

Outside of China, CXMT is still overshadowed by memory's other major players. Looking at the 'big 3', SK hynix is currently enjoying a market capitalisation of over $777 billion, Micron has $1.04 trillion, and Samsung has over $1.135 trillion at time of writing. Even so, Micron has reportedly been looking over its shoulder, urging US lawmakers to curb CXMT's access to chipmaking equipment.

Bubble or no bubble (though, if you're asking me, probably definitely a bubble), CXMT will continue to be the name on the industry's lips—especially as it's seemingly found at least one powerful ally. Sources claim that Apple has recently sought assurances that the memory manufacturer won't be placed on the US Department of Commerce's 'Entity List'. Having raised Mac and iPad prices due to runaway memory costs, it's little wonder why CXMT may have caught Apple's eye. If Apple succeeds in bringing CXMT memory to its tablets and phones in the US, then it probably won't be long before you start to see CXMT DRAM in a PC near you.

Qualcomm, the company behind the Snapdragon chips you will find in many phones, Windows on Arm laptops, and VR headsets, is reportedly raising its prices starting September 1. Unfortunately, that could mean bad news for both WoA and future VR headsets.

This is according to a letter sent to customers on Friday, which was seen by Bloomberg. According to that document, the price increase will be a percentage in the double digits, and presumably, that rise will only worsen the price of the devices that use the company's chips.

One such device is Valve's Steam Frame, which rocks a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and is said to be launching soon. The Steam Frame is its new wireless VR headset, and one designed for game streaming. It uses a special dongle for foveated streaming, which delivers the parts you are looking at in higher quality, saving on bandwidth. Steam has said all three pieces of its hardware triumvirate (Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame) would launch by the end of Summer, which means we have around a month left before that self-imposed deadline.

Though Valve is unlikely to eat those extra costs, it does reportedly have tens of thousands of kilograms worth of headsets in the US, so it presumably has a stockpile to sell before those price jumps might impact the end sale price. The Steam Machine, its TV-friendly gaming PC, was hit hard by the memory crisis, causing prices to increase before it was even launched, with its cheapest model being $1,049. Valve noted to us that it really wanted to sell it for much cheaper than that.

And Valve isn't the only major brand that uses Qualcomm chips. Meta has traditionally worked with the company to provide the chips for its Quest VR headset, and Meta is even reportedly working on 'multiple next-generation headsets'. We will see more information on what Meta is working on at Meta Connect at the end of September this year.

Qualcomm claims that it exhausted other options before coming to the realisation it would have to raise prices, and it even reportedly made attempts to get alternative components from new sources to keep costs down. As of right now, we don't know what those alternative components are, whether those are different memory chips or other parts of its SoCs.

Qualcomm is a big customer of the Taiwanese-based TSMC (which has recently announced its own price hikes), but the memory shortage is making it difficult to get all kinds of hardware at reasonable prices and in reasonable quantities. Qualcomm has reportedly been struggling for a while with the memory crisis, as smartphone manufacturers have been unable to build the supply that they once did, prior to the crisis.

It's a particularly bad time to hit Qualcomm as it has recently made some impressive strides into the gaming sphere, with the likes of its X2 Elite chips coming packed with some serious gaming chops. Windows on Arm is finally starting to receive some love (even Nvidia is investing in it, with its RTX Spark chip), and it could take the fight to x86 in the future, but that's only if prices stay good enough for customers to actually buy. It seems like the memory crisis isn't finished taking the hardware out of your hands and feeding it straight to the AI machine. And even Valve sees no end in sight for it.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) is planning to break into the US memory market. According to sources close to the matter, branching out overseas is part of a longer-term plan for the Chinese firm that has swiftly become the fourth-biggest maker of memory in the world.

CXMT has been on my radar lately as multiple motherboard and PC component makers have made moves to validate its memory for their products. Considering the news that CXMT is reportedly massively ramping up its DRAM capacity during these times of memory shortage, it's not hard to see why.

However, we're still a ways off from seeing CXMT DRAM become more readily available in the US; in the nearer term, CXMT will have to navigate both intense domestic demand in China, as well as Western competitor Micron urging US lawmakers to curb the company's access to key equipment, plus a sword of Damocles in the form of a spot on the Commerce Department's trade blacklist (via Reuters).

Not even Apple has been safe from the effects of the memory crisis, and has been keen to seek assurances CXMT won't be placed on the US' "Entity List". Even with such a powerful supporter looking to buy its wares, what remains is still a challenging geopolitical obstacle course for CXMT to navigate.

Still, CXMT may have sufficient weight behind it to bulldoze through. For one thing, the firm saw $7.5 billion in revenue in Q1, which both represented a 719% year-on-year increase and erased six months of losses. The company also enjoyed Asia's largest IPO of the year, raising $8.6 billion. It's also obviously worth noting that CXMT is also supported by the state-backed semiconductor investment vehicle often simply referred to as the 'Big Fund'.

Money talks, but here's an illustrative example: Huawei, arguably the major player in Chinese big tech, has reportedly been demanding relief from CXMT over escalating costs. CXMT has chosen not to relent, with the situation finally coming to a head on one of its factory floors in June. Sources say a number of engineers were carrying out equipment maintenance when CXMT ordered them to leave its factory. Why? Because the engineers hailed from a vendor with extremely close ties to Huawei.

Though the company continues to work with Huawei, the engineers have not been allowed back. Huawei also remains without recourse to challenge CXMT's prices, just going to show how much power the memory manufacturer wields at home. Though seemingly unstoppable in China, whether CXMT will ever realise its Stateside ambitions remains to be seen.

1,474,560 bytes may sound like a lot for those unfamiliar with the realities of modern data storage, but it amounts to a single 3.5-inch floppy disk. The hey-day of such a relic of physical media has long since passed, but floppy disks obviously still hold a certain allure for some judging by a certain Korean game dev contest.

Anyone can participate in the contest from Korean indie game site 2P Game Arcade, and the rules are very simple: devs just need to build a game that totals no more than 1,474,560 bytes (or 1.44 MB) after decompression (via Techspot).

Though there are no restrictions on which engine devs may use, the work itself must be an original creation made after the contest announcement date on May 26. The teeny-tiny game must also be playable as a standalone executable (browser-based games are not eligible). Devs have until midnight on September 4 to turn in their work.

There are prizes to be won, though a far cry from the $80,000 the EVE Online devs recently awarded to its own mod contest winners. The machine translation of the 2P Game Arcade contest page describes these prizes as only 'a small souvenir,' with first place taking home 720,000 won (about $490).

The judging criteria is just as straightforward as the rules: "1. Whether the game is complete. 2. Whether the capacity has been exceeded," and perhaps most importantly, "3. Whether the game is fun."

Considering how chunky modern game files are (not to mention what a premium system storage comes at these days), the whole premise of the contest is pretty refreshing. That said, 1.44 MB is barely enough room to swing around a pixel-based sprite of a cat. In the immortal words of Ru Paul, I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Over the last few months, Framework has been doing a pretty good job of keeping RAM prices for its modular laptops/mainboards/desktops from climbing too high as a result of the global memory shortage, though storage hasn't fared quite so well. And now, RAM unfortunately isn't faring so well, either.

The company explains in its monthly memory and storage pricing update that its memory module supplier has raised its prices substantially. And unfortunately it's to the extent that Framework isn't going to be able to eat the extra cost.

"We recently received a cost update from our LPCAMM2 supplier that goes far beyond anything we had predicted and anything we’re able to absorb without placing our ability to operate at real financial risk. Rather than the low-to-mid double digit percentage increase we had forecast from Q2 to Q3 on LPCAMM2 costs, we received prices that are more than double that of the prior inventory we had brought in."

Framework's explanation for what it's having to change given this is a little confusing, but essentially it looks like all remaining 64 GB module stock the company has will cover already-existing laptop and mainboard pre-orders using these modules, but when that runs out the order config has been changed to use a 32 GB module at original pricing.

Ditto for pre-orders configured with 32 GB modules: these will be fulfilled as much as stock permits but some will be re-configured to use a 16 GB module at original pricing.

There have been some other changes, such as bringing down costs on 48 GB DDR5 modules and reducing pricing, but on the other hand, costs rising for 16 GB capacity and prices increasing respectively.

"The same dynamic is playing out on storage modules. We’ve been able to reduce pricing of SN850X 8TB and SN7100 1TB, while needing to increase pricing on SN850X 1TB and SN7100 4TB."

Existing pre-order prices will be honored even if prices have now increased, however, and if prices have been reduced for something since an existing pre-order, those pre-orders will see their prices automatically reduced.

In other words, it sounds like Framework is doing everything it can to prevent negative impact to existing pre-orders. But a relatively small device manufacturer such as Framework is likely to be one of the more vulnerable companies in the face of ever-higher memory costs. It doesn't have the buying power the likes of Lenovo or Dell can call on, and also cannot swallow those extra costs, either.

Setting aside the unfortunate pricing changes, let's appreciate for a moment how useful it is to have Framework provide these updates, from an industry-watching perspective. It's a great way to keep an eye on how the global memory shortage is actually affecting customers for consumer devices. Even if that story is a little depressing.

I'm just holding out for companies to start making use of Chinese memory, which seems to be blooming right now. Though perhaps having hopes for lower prices because of that is just the naive optimist in me.

The PC hardware market right now is not a pretty sight, so it's nice to hear one of the companies arguably at least in part responsible acknowledging how bad things are from a customer's perspective. Even if that is taken with the giant pinch of salt considering it's being approached from a business perspective, and discussing the ability for other companies to absorb costs.

As The Chosun Daily reports, SK hynix group chairman (ie, head of the board) Chey Tae-won recently admitted to the the press that memory prices are "abnormally high" and said "there are limits to how much prices can be raised". Apparently the company is considering building a factory in the US to help with supply and trade pressures.

"Supply must be increased to lower prices, even for the sake of semiconductor companies... Memory prices are currently at an abnormally high level. While AI companies can absorb increased costs through investments, PC and smartphone manufacturers have no choice but to pass semiconductor price hikes onto product prices."

"Since most customers for these products are individuals, there are limits to how much prices can be raised. To prevent 'chipflation'—where rising chip prices drive up finished product costs—supply must be increased."

In other words, while rising memory costs might be no problemo as far as AI companies and concerned, it's a different story for PC and smartphone manufacturers. That's because their customers are individuals like us who cannot afford to just take the hikes on the chin. We don't get to take out multi-million loans for our hardware.

But why should the actual semiconductor manufacturers care? If the big AI customers are happy, surely that's enough, right?

Not quite, says Tae-won:

"Even if profit margins are reduced, increasing supply, protecting the market, and growing together is essential for the sustainability and development of South Korea’s semiconductor industry. If factories are not built and prices keep rising, the market will shrink, and new entrants will inevitably flood in."

New entrants, ie, competition the company would rather not deal with. So more supply and lower prices are in everyone's interest, according to Tae-won.

I'm not going to pretend to be enough of an economic boffin to know how likely it is that we would see such competitive "entrants", but any notes of concern over prices from memory companies is a good thing in my books. Especially given SK hynix's CEO is forecasting next year to be "the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective."

The CEO also predicted that demand will remain higher than supply beyond 2030, which was recently echoed by independent analysis. More supply would certainly be welcome, although I should mention that the aforementioned analysis does predict the "2030 DRAM squeeze" will hit regardless of predicted supply expansion from all the big memory makers, including China.

I suppose, therefore, the worry is that even if these memory makers do start taking customer price increases very seriously, it might make no difference unless and until AI demand goes down. Perhaps with an audible 'pop'.

Steam Game Cartridges from r/pcmasterrace

One Redditor has created a physical media project that not only laser-targets my cartridge-based obsession but also scoffs at the raging memory supply crisis. User Jibril-sama scored a bunch of second-hand 2.5-inch SSDs "for cheap" and has leveraged them to create a game cartridge system for their Steam library.

The Redditor explains that the games are actually loaded onto the SSD-based 'cartridges,' and they've even gone to the effort of creating colourful housing featuring each game's cover art. When the SSD is slotted into the drive dock, a script auto-navigates Steam to the game's library page by leveraging Valve’s Steam browser protocol. Apparently, the system can also be set up to immediately launch each game too.

Now, in the midst of massively spiking memory prices, the obvious question to ask is just how cheap those 2.5-inch drives were. The Redditor explains in comments that they "just got lucky," purchasing a number of 128 GB SSDs for only €7 ($8) each.

So, unfortunately, anyone attempting to replicate this Redditor's system would likely have to spend much, much more on the SSD 'cartridges' than what they paid for their games. Some folks really do get all the luck. The Redditor goes on to say, "Found someone selling them in bulk. Probably some refurb station taken out of old PCs or something."

Though not always practical, it's not hard to see the appeal of physical games media even in this here year of our gourd 2026. I'm not sure I'd have space for physical PC games between all of my PlayStation and Switch game cases—not to mention my collection of Miku Hatsune figurines. Still, as just one of the Nintendo-liking interlopers here at PCG, I perhaps have an undeserved amount of affection for game cartridges specifically.

On the other hand, perhaps affection for physical media is absolutely deserved. PlayStation platform-owner Sony recently announced it wouldn't be producing physical game discs after 2028. The news led to Dutch consumer organization, Stichting Massaschade & Consument, filing a lawsuit against Sony. Company chair Lucia Melcherts explained, "No discs means no second-hand market and no alternative to the PlayStation Store, so from 2028, Sony alone decides what a game costs and even how long you are allowed to use it."

Though there are a number of DRM-free games available via Steam that don't need the software client to launch, there are still plenty that do. So long as that remains true, and other game corporations move towards implementing their own launchers, the anxious question of 'how much do you really own your digital games?' will never really go away.

Earlier today I reported that Chinese memory makers, such as CXMT, are ramping up their production big time, and are set to run hot on the heels of Micron in output even by the end of this year. But hold up, don't get too excited, because the same research that produced those figures also predicts "the 2030 DRAM squeeze" matching the SK hynix CEO's warnings from earlier in the week.

As relayed by Citrini researcher Zephyr on X, even by 2030 and factoring in increased supply from China, there will still be a shortfall. Demand for DRAM will still exceed supply—and it won't even be particularly close.

Citrini's research predicts a 28.7 exabyte (EB) shortfall out of a total global demand of 157.5 EB. The overall figure includes HBM as well as DRAM, but "general DRAM remains the main bottleneck."

What's more, given they haven't modeled any demand for physical AI (such as humanoides or autonomous cars), Zephyr says: "even if my DC & AI demand estimates are too high (they are not), it will be balanced out by physical AI demand."

If those numbers seem big, too, it's because they are. Current estimates have it that this year will see a global capacity of 40 EB of DRAM. That's not that much more than the shortfall—the unmet demand—it's being predicted we'll see in 2030. Ever-more production, ever-more demand.

One thing that makes my stomach sink is seeing, in the graphic, how the expected consumer demand section is smaller than the unfulfilled demand section. Consumer demand meaning, of course, demand for products such as RAM sticks for people like you and I, rather than for big servers.

To wit, Zephyr again: "I expect a 25% deficit for the general DRAM market. 91 EB/year of supply versus 120 EB/yr of demand. DRAM ASP will remain inflated and will likely stay in the $1.5/Gb-$2.0/Gb range."

There is, of course, always the possibility that innovations pertaining to AI efficiency could help improve the situation and lessen demand. Google's recently developed TurboQuant algorithm, for instance, promises a 6x reduction in memory overhead. Though whether such developments actually reduce demand or simply open up room for even more AI is also an open question.

Recently a bunch of motherboard and component makers have been validating their stuff for Chinese-made memory. That's brands including biggies, such as MSI and Asus. The reason, it turns out, is apparently a massive ramp up in the amount of DRAM production coming from China, especially from memory maker CXMT.

Basing their analysis largely on Citrini's research, analyst Zephyr on X explains that, with all the changes afoot for the company, "CXMT can potentially add 600k-1.1M WPM [wafers per month] of DRAM capacity and have a total capacity of around 950k-1.45M WPM."

That predicted capacity includes 350,000 WPM produced by CXMT by the end of 2026, which TechPowerUp correctly notes is close to the 375,000 WPM that Micron is expected to hit this year. In other words, it looks like a Chinese memory maker will very quickly catch up to Micron.

The industry changes leading to this include, of course, expanding fabs, but also potentially building new ones and also creating a new R&D line. YMTC, too, is expanding, though seemingly not to the same extent.

All of this can be done incredibly quickly, compared to what we see in the West, according to Zephyr: "cleanroom construction time is around 12 months compared to 21-24 months in the Rest of the World."

This is in large part because Chinese memory companies can receive a bunch of state backing. In a time when there's a global shortage and massive demand, it's not exactly difficult to justify funding from state or private sectors.

So, it's not really a surprise that component makers are validating their products for Chinese memory. The customer demand is most definitely there for the new memory to be made use of, so motherboard BIOS updates from MSI and Asus validating faster Chinese memory, as has been occurring, make sense. As does Corsair and Lexar using (or planning to use) CXMT DRAM in its Chinese-aimed RAM kits.

Our own previous research on Chinese RAM indicated that while it's good enough for gaming, the value wasn't there. But with massively increased production, that could change, especially if, following Asus (but not MSI) these Chinese memory-validating BIOS updates aren't only for mobos in China. Fingers crossed. Though I suppose AI server demand is high enough that it will still chomp through a lot of this new global memory capacity, too.

It was still a ways off, but I'd kind of latched on to '2028' being the end in sight of the raging memory supply crisis. However, SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-Jung reckons we should only be so lucky.

"We forecast that ‌next year will be the worst year in the industry's history from the supply perspective," Kwak recently told Reuters. Not only is 2027 apparently set to be even worse, but Kwak also predicts the situation won't improve for years beyond the 2028 date I'd been holding on to, when SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung are all set to complete capacity expanding builds.

"Our customer demand continues to go up, while our capacity has limitations," Kwak said, "We still forecast that customer demand will remain higher than our supply capacity even beyond 2030. But we are doing our best to solve the problem."

The company also began trading on Nasdaq last Friday, with a US megalisting of shares that was seven times oversubscribed. SK hynix said then that it wants to use the resulting capital for at least two more construction projects in South Korea: a fabrication hub in Yongin, as well as an advanced packaging facility in Cheongju.

Kwak also said that the company is considering a number of other global sites for future wafer ⁠fabrication investment. He said, "The ​US, Japan, and Southeast Asia are all under consideration. Nothing has been decided yet. We are evaluating which location can provide the greatest business advantage."

The tech stock market is still incredibly volatile though; while SK hynix shares were up 13.3% at $168.85 on the Nasdaq Friday afternoon, the company's shares then plunged by 15% in Seoul on Monday. According to Reuters, this marks the company's biggest one-day decline in nearly 20 years. As for the company's US-listed shares come Monday morning, those dipped by 9.2% to $152.50.

What explains that dip? For one thing, analysts say that South Korea's recent multi-billion dollar investments in the AI chip industry, plus all of those other capacity-expanding builds I mentioned earlier, has heightened investor anxiety that tight memory supply may tip over into oversupply in the coming years. Jing Jie Yu, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said, "Our base case here is the fresh capacity in 2027 and 2028 coming up in earnest will improve supply dynamics, thereby leading to price erosion."

Furthermore, the AI bubble is arguably looking a bit strained. Morningstar's director, Lorraine Tan, said, "Despite accelerating artificial intelligence adoption, monetisation remains uncertain and profitability for key players, such as OpenAI, appears to be under pressure. Funding is also shifting toward debt or equity, raising concerns about the maintainability of current spending levels."

In other words, yes, the industry is hoovering up all the memory, but if AI spending fails to see a sensible return on that investment, or data centre build out calms down, the bubble may burst and there will be much less demand for all of that silicon.

The idea of taking serious hardware horsepower on the go was always the dream of my misspent, console-gaming youth. Don't get me wrong, I've always loved how older handheld systems made a calling card out of their limitations (and in the case of Nintendo, offered a hardware gimmick or gaming experience you couldn't find anywhere else). The fact that now you can play many of the same games on a portable device that you can also play in your gamer den would've blown my younger self's mind.

Unfortunately, the dream-come-true of handheld gaming PCs feels like it is coming to an end.

Our Andy updates our handheld gaming PC deals each week and recently shared a shocking revelation: 'Somehow, the $1,000 Asus ROG Ally Xbox X is the best value gaming handheld I can think of right now.' If you've got the cash then, sure, the Asus ROG Ally Xbox X with its AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip, 24 GB of RAM, and 1 TB of onboard SSD storage makes sense for the asking price. But where does that leave you if you're on a much tighter budget?

The memory supply crisis has raised the pricing floor of all handhelds. Case in point, the device that we still rate as the best budget handheld gaming PC is the Steam Deck. The more affordable LCD models were quietly discontinued last year, leaving those looking to buy a Steam Deck new with only the very shiny OLED models to choose from. Years after release, the price for the base 512 GB OLED model has increased from $549 to $789. The 1 TB model has seen an almost 50% price increase, jumping from $649 to $949. The answer, then, to where that leaves the more budget-conscious? Without a paddle.

Despite this price hike (and the handheld's aged internals), both models of the Steam Deck sold out in North America shortly after the increase was announced back in May. The 1 TB model, which is going for £779 where I'm based in the UK, appears to be out of stock again at the time of writing. But I doubt this is a sustainable trend.

Let's zoom out a smidge. I update our best SSD deals every week, so I've not had the luxury of ignoring how storage prices have been climbing since the tail end of last year. Research suggests that memory prices are likely to rise as much as 50% in Q3 alone. Recent analysis by Bernstein suggests prices won't dip until 2028, when major manufacturers are expected to complete a number of capacity-increasing builds.

But here and now in 2026, it's not just gaming PC components that have seen price increases as a result of the memory supply crisis. For example, the Playstation 5 has seen three different price increases over the last six years and now costs a minimum of $650. I've written about it before but, despite buying a launch day PS5, it's becoming increasingly unlikely I'll pick up a PS6 day one. After all, if the PS5 Pro costs $900 today, how much more will the PS6 cost?

Hey, maybe Bernstein's predictions will bear out and hardware pricing will look a lot more sensible by the time Sony's next-gen console drops in 2028 or even 2029. But in the here and now, handheld gaming PCs remain in an arguably much more difficult position within the consumer market.

For those who don't already have a gaming PC, there's little doubt that a $650 base PS5 is going to look like the more economical option (particularly as Sony won't be bringing its handful of exclusives to PC in future, but maybe it's just me mourning the loss of, like, four games). If you already own a gaming PC, you'll likely want to save your pennies for increasingly expensive component upgrades. Where would a handheld feature in either budget?

The data suggests gamers generally are still willing to part with the cash for new hardware—though they aren't necessarily picking up a handheld gaming PC. A recent Circana report shared that the handheld of choice was overwhelmingly the Nintendo Switch 2, with the hybrid console largely credited for a year-over-year hardware spending increase that grew by 69%, climbing to $500 million this past March.

The Switch 2 saw its own price increase announced back in May, so it's worth pondering how much of this recent consumer clamour was motivated by a desire to scoop the console before it became more expensive. Even so, Nintendo's handheld is set to cost $500 from September 1 in the US.

There are plenty of PC gamers who have no interest in what the big N is doing these days, but a broad-view of today's gaming audience suggests a lot of gamers are more platform-agnostic. For instance, a 2023 Comscore report found 76% of gamers play across multiple platforms. Therefore, it's hard to ignore handheld gaming PC's most obvious competitor, even if the Switch 2 is underpowered compared to many of the available portable gaming options.

In short, the most performant handheld gaming PCs ask a price that's far too rich for my blood, and the best budget option is arguably not quite as compelling as Nintendo's offering (even after the price hike comes into effect later this year).

To paraphrase Andy's point, there's a chance gaming handhelds eventually revert to occupying a boutique niche for gamers with especially deep pockets. That's how they were in the before times prior to the Steam Deck's launch, with smaller Chinese outfits, such as OneXPlayer, releasing expensive, weak, poorly optimised devices. That's not really the future I want for handheld gaming PCs, but it's a strong possibility. However, given the state of, well, everything, I find myself taking a bleaker outlook.

In the longer term, it doesn't feel like handheld gaming PCs are the most economical proposition for brands or manufacturers either. For example, back in March Ayaneo suspended pre-orders for its uber-powerful Next 2 gaming handheld after costs approached 'twice the price we originally set'. To be clear, I strongly doubt Valve is going to pack it in with the Steam Deck any time soon. However, smaller companies with a much less diverse portfolio than, say, the company behind one of the largest storefronts for digital games, are likely to struggle.

What seems certain is that prices will continue to rise and meaningful chunks of the devices' audience will be priced out. My concern is that the maths may simply no longer math, and hardware companies will increasingly decide that handheld gaming PCs specifically just aren't worth it. For my wide-eyed younger self, I hope I'm wrong.

If you thought Meta was stepping away from the VR market after seemingly turning away from the Metaverse and closing 3 VR studios earlier this year, think again, buddy. It seems like the plan as of right now is to put out multiple headsets in the future, memory crisis be damned.

The news comes from the mouth of Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who took to Instagram to answer questions (via UploadVR). When asked if Meta has given up on VR, he said, "No. We've talked about this a lot this year—kind of an odd comment. We've just updated the user interface profoundly for the first time in years. We've talked openly about the fact that we're building multiple next-generation headsets."

That's true. In the Q4 earnings call for 2025, which was announced in January 2026, Meta CFO Susan Li said the company is still building future headsets. Bosworth also said a potential Meta Quest 4 would be on the way shortly after this earnings call. However, the closing of studios doesn't exactly help her point. Bosworth addresses this point, saying, "We did get ourselves into a more sustainable shape, that's true. But no. We continue to invest quite a bit there."

Bosworth ends this answer by telling viewers to keep an eye on Meta Connect for more details. Meta Connect is Meta's yearly conference, where it communicates plans for the company going forward to the rest of the world. This year it will happen on September 23 and 24, so we should expect an announcement or tease of at least one of the headsets by then.

There is one major headset scheduled for release between now and then, though: the Steam Frame. We've seen a huge shipment of the Steam Frame going to the US recently, and the 'Great on Frame' tag has popped up on the Steam storefront. Valve said it is due to launch in the Summer, so we're expecting the headset very soon.

Both Valve's headset and whatever Meta is cooking up will have major question marks over their heads around the price, and that will be the biggest concern going forward. The Steam Frame has 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory, and the Meta Quest 3 uses 8 GB of LPDDR5 memory. There is, of course, a certain painful irony in Meta, a company going all-in on AI, potentially struggling because of the effects of AI expansion (ie, data centres slurping up all that hardware).

For Meta's next headset to truly be 'next-generation', it will need the hardware to back it up, and that hardware is likely to stay expensive for some time. This is all to say the next two years are a really bad time to put out hardware, and Meta will really want this one to land, especially given the downsizing it did earlier this year. September will be a big month for the Facebook owner, in more ways than one.

The memory supply crisis looks set to rage until at least 2028, when major players Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron all look set to complete capacity-expanding builds. However, that's still a way off. So, a number of component companies are now looking to another China-based competitor to meet their memory demands.

Earlier this week, MSI announced BIOS support on its AMD motherboards for DDR5 memory from CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies). Previously, you could use CXMT's modules, but these were limited to DDR5-6800. MSI's latest update now supports up to DDR5-8200 (via VideoCardz). And it's not just MSI moving forward with CXMT memory validation.

Asus joined the party by sharing a similar update for its own AM5 socket mobos. Depending on your hardware loadout, this update can support up to DDR5-8200—though the highest result Asus shared was a KingBank 2x 24 GB DDR5-6000 kit overclocked to DDR5-8400.

Unlike MSI, Asus' BIOS version 1686 is available via its global support pages and therefore not limited to use within the Chinese market. If you fancy giving it a go yourself, be sure to read Nick's market research on Chinese DRAM first. Besides KingBank and its DDR5 kit's tasty overclocked results, there are a few other Chinese options to keep an eye out for.

Tom's Hardware reported earlier this year that Corsair had started using CXMT DDR5 DRAM dies in its Vengeance RAM kits aimed at the Chinese market. Besides Corsair, Lexar is also reportedly planning to use CXMT DRAM for its new Thor DDR5-7600 CL38 memory kits (MSI's validation tests used a Lexar kit, but didn't mention a model name at the time). A DDR5-7200 CL38 configuration is expected to also be available, and both kits will comprise two 16 GB sticks.

The memory landscape being what it is, there's a lot of interest in CXMT. According to the Financial Times, the memory crisis has transformed CXMT's fortunes; besides Apple also testing the company's DRAM chips as an option for the devices it sells in China, CXMT is now the fourth largest producer of DRAM behind the usual suspects. Accounting for 11% of wafer capacity last year, that figure is expected to grow to 15% by 2028. But as for revenue, the company made a 33 billion yuan net profit during the first quarter of 2026. That represents a 719% year-on-year jump.

The company's rise to prominence isn't without controversy, though. For just one thing, a former Samsung researcher was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for leaking core DRAM semiconductor tech to CXMT. For another, the Pentagon has blacklisted CXMT for allegedly working with China’s military, according to Bloomberg, leaving Apple to apparently lobby for the clearance necessary to buy CXMT's memory. Whatever happens with those efforts, we're bound to be hearing a lot more about the DRAM chipmaker over the coming months and years.

So, I've got to ask: Did you guys see this whole memory crisis coming a mile off, or what? Because, while we're continually bemoaning the state of the industry with AI datacenter business hoarding all the available memory as fast as Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron can make it—and the ensuing pricing batshittery that has followed it—you lot have seemingly been securing yourselves against the RAMpocalypse.

With the topic of widespread hardware price rises owing to this memory demand and supply issue being something that is almost permanently in our heads on the PCG hardware team, we thought it worth just finding out how you guys were faring in these troubling times.

So, over the past week, we've been asking one simple question: How much RAM do you have in your current gaming rig? And the answers have been interestingly enlightening; basically, the vast majority of you had already protected yourself from the core issue by filling your machines with a whole lot of RAM already.

I will admit I had my own expectations, which have been utterly overturned by the data you guys have provided. I thought that there would effectively be some level-pegging between those rocking 16 GB of RAM and those with 32 GB in their gaming PCs. But the numbers are not even close.

A solid 50% of readers already have 32 GB of RAM in their main gaming PCs, which is by far the biggest contingent in the results. Those with 16 GB of RAM surprisingly only make up 18% of the readers who responded to the survey, which is actually less than the number of people who've gone even bigger with 64 GB of RAM. Golly.

How much RAM do you have in your current gaming rig?

Votes (%)

32 GB

50

64 GB

20

16 GB

18

MOAR THAN 64 GB, MWAHAHAHAHA

7

8 GB

3

48 GB

2

Votes (%) Data

Product	Value
32 GB	50
64 GB	20
16 GB	18
MOAR THAN 64 GB, MWAHAHAHAHA	7
8 GB	3
48 GB	2

In fact, if you combine the 3% still sporting 8 GB of memory (how do you get anything done, and which version of Linux are you using?) and those with 16 GB, that only just about tops the number with 64 GB, and then by only 133 votes.

Then you have the local AI luvvers (surely) who are sporting more than 64 GB of RAM, which makes up a surprisingly large 7% of responders.

The thing to note here, however, is that we are still just talking about capacity, and that isn't the be-all and end-all of memory. You could be sitting on a ton of DDR4 RAM with a limited upgrade path for future CPU platforms. But in today's climate, I'd probably be happier sitting on 32 GB DDR4 than 16 GB DDR5, because even the CPUs of those latter generations will still be keeping modern GPUs happily fed with raw frames to play with.

It also doesn't secure you against the knock-on effects of the memory crisis, either. Sure, you might have lots of system memory, but buying extra storage for your PC or NAS box is still a nightmare experience. To say nothing of the rising prices of PCs, laptops, graphics cards, and pretty much anything else that can claim to need memory.

I would bet we're not far off peripheral makers trying to justify a me-too price hike by saying the memory chips they need for saving tiny profiles necessitate 200% increases.

Let us know in the comments where you stand on this sliding scale of memory capacity, and how the memory crisis has affected you and your PC gaming experience.

This week's question:

If you've spent any time on Steam from your Steam Deck, there's a good chance you recognise the 'Great on Deck' tag, signifying that games work, well, great on Deck. Well, Steam has just published its Great on Frame collection, and you get three guesses what that could be for.

As spotted by SadlyItsBradley on X, the new category is live now and comes with just four games. The games are Portal 2, Into Black, Aperture Hand Lab and The Lab. Into Black is the odd one out here, as it's the only title not published by Valve in the list, but that's a good sign too. It suggests there's some level of outreach from Valve to other companies.

The plan seems to be to add more games to this category over time, as the Upcoming section is currently entirely empty. Valve's Steam Frame is the only bit of new hardware from Valve that is not live yet. As Valve confirmed a Summer release window for it and the Steam Machine, all this points to an imminent launch.

As of last month, packages of the Steam Frame began arriving in the US. Those packages total 32,000 kg, so the likelihood is these aren't test builds or prototypes. All signs suggest that Valve is gearing up to actually put out the device in the near future.

The fact that the 'Great on Frame' collection is even live means Valve is either ready for the Steam Frame to launch very soon, or it was published by accident, and spotted by meddlesome analysts. The only problem with the Great on Frame collection is that the fact that games are appearing on it doesn't necessarily mean they actually work in VR. You can play flat games on the Steam Frame, so 'Great on Frame' could simply suggest it has been verified to work well in plain old 2D mode.

Still, even playing 2D games on the Steam Frame should serve to be plenty immersive. Valve has managed to entirely ditch the wires here, and it even has some neat built-in functions that help it stand out among its competition.

It has a special antenna for picking up a connection sent directly from a connector on your PC, which allows it to stream your games without any interference. And to top it all off, Valve has implemented foveated streaming, which means it focuses the bandwidth on exactly where your eyes are looking to get even better performance out of the headset.

The only question left, other than the exact release date, is the price point, and for that, I'm preparing for the worst. With all its little tricks and engineering feats, plus the Snapdragon chip and storage, I would have expected a hefty price even before the memory crisis. But now, its included 16 GB of LPDDR5X memory is sure to fetch a pretty penny, and Valve can't afford to eat the cost of production like console manufacturers can.

Either way, we're expecting to find out the answer to both questions in the coming weeks, assuming Valve sticks to its Summer promise.

With the memory crisis in full swing, it's becoming harder and harder to justify that PC upgrade. Though some will simply have enough money not to care, or will be forced to upgrade through breakages, others will simply go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. Well, that waiting seems to have resulted in a pretty large decline in PC shipments, year-over-year.

According to analysis from the IDC, worldwide PC shipments have fallen by 4.9% between Q2 last year to Q2 this year (via Wccftech). This is reportedly "the first decline after nine consecutive quarters of growth" and, you guessed it, the memory crisis is to blame.

Tracking shipments last year and this year, ICD reports Lenovo dropping from 17 million units to 16.6 million, HP from 14.3 million to 13 million, Dell from 9.8 million to 9.3 million, and Asus at nearly flat growth. The only winner over the last year is Apple, which grew from 6.1 million to 6.7 million, representing a pretty substantial 10% increase. Apple also jumped from an 8.5% market share to a 9.9% market share.

Despite declining shipments, many of these companies aren't losing that much in revenue. That's because they can counteract the loss of sales through rising memory costs by getting consumers to pay for the price-inflated stock. Jitesh Ubrani, the research director for consumer devices at IDC, says, “The real story here is the disconnect between units and dollars: shipments are falling, but revenue is climbing because vendors are pushing through price increases faster than demand is dropping.”

IDC says that supply chain management and capabilities will continue to be incredibly important going forward. Some major manufacturers will be increasingly signing long-term contracts to supply memory and storage for devices, in order to keep selling through the memory crisis. That probably doesn't mean good things for smaller operators, as they'll have to navigate the larger companies' increased buying and negotiating power.

Others, such as Apple, have managed to capitalise on the problem with the launch of its budget-oriented MacBook Neo. Jean Philippe Bouchard, the vice president for consumer devices at IDC, says, “Apple’s share gain coincided with its latest product launch, the MacBook Neo, and while the company did raise prices in line with the broader market, it still remains well positioned against rivals facing the same cost pressures.”

It's worth noting that this is a report on global PC shipments, not necessarily gaming PC shipments, which have historically fared better during periods of decline. But these are far from normal times, and the memory crisis seems set to rage for another year at least.

Bernstein research analysts reckon SK hynix will significantly reduce its prices by the end of 2028, but we are likely to see more increases before then. And even then, that's a pretty optimistic outlook. If the memory crisis only lasts for another year and a half, I'd consider us rather lucky. It's anyone's guess what the PC market will look like by then, and who the winners of the memory crisis will be.

Thank you again rural Walmart from r/pcmasterrace

Thanks to the very hungry AI industry and the resulting memory supply crisis, RAM is reaching prices I naively once thought impossible. Between the tail end of 2025 and now, I've had a bit of a rude awakening, let me tell ya. However, that doesn't mean you can't get RAM for a reasonable price—you just need to know where to look.

One lucky Redditor shared an amazing find, posting they'd picked up 32 GB of DDR4 memory for only $50. Then they found a second kit for the same price. That's 64 GB of RAM for 100 bucks total. Now, the obvious question is 'Where did this jammy poster make such a mythical find?' Apparently, in a rural Walmart though the poster has not yet specified a US state.

The really eye-widening detail is that the Reddit user got the two kits on clearance, with a bright yellow sticker on the box declaring that both kits had been reduced down from $319. An equivalent kit will set you back about $230 from Amazon at time of writing. This is your irregularly scheduled reminder to check out your local rural retailer.

Now, there's always the option to simply wait out the memory crisis. Our Nick did the testing earlier this year, and found that 16 GB of RAM is absolutely fine for PC gaming in 2026. Mind you, that does come with its share of caveats. Furthermore, sources say the memory supply crisis won't ease until at least 2028 when a number of major memory manufacturers complete their capacity-expanding builds.

All of that is to say, perhaps your rig is in a position where a memory upgrade just can't wait that long. As analysts reckon memory prices will continue to rise this year, with some even predicting a spike as significant as 50% in Q3, you may want to check your own rural retailer sooner rather than later.

Failing that, you can stick with us on the hardware team as we keep our eyes peeled for what few RAM deals there are. Though, to get 32 GB at an even sort of reasonable price, you may be better off scooping up one of the best cheap gaming PC deals instead.

It often seems like there's no light at the end of the memory crisis tunnel. That's not just my opinion; it's what I was told a few months ago by Maingear CEO Wallace Santos. But analysts from Bernstein have forecast something quite positive for DRAM at the end of 2028, as long as you can hold out for that long.

As spotted by tech analyst Jukan05, Bernstein research analysts recently made financial estimates for the margins of SK hynix over the next few years. For the unaware, SK hynix is one of the single biggest makers of memory right now (alongside Samsung and Micron), and will be making money hand over fist with the memory crisis in full swing.

Bernstein reckons SK hynix's gross margin on DRAM (percentage of revenue after taking away cost of goods) will be as high as 90.9% in Q2 2026, and will go all the way up to 92.7% in Q4 this year. To pair with this, Bernstein believes that the ASP (average selling price) will be as high as $1.85 per GB, which is more than three times what it was in 2025.

This is all to say that, for the rest of 2026, Bernstein reckons the price of DRAM will only rise. The research analysts think it will hit a peak of $2.23 per GB (almost five times higher than in 2025) by the end of 2027, with a gross margin of 94%.

However, there is some potential good news, too. Bernstein also estimates that 2028 will see a decline in gross margin and the ASP, with SK hynix expected to sit at a still very healthy 86.4%, with an ASP of $1.05 per GB. That's more than a 50% drop from the previous year and only a near 100% increase from 2025.

NAND revenue has received similar projections from Bernstein too, with it anticipating a drop from $0.32 per GB at the end of 2027 to $0.1 per GB at the end of 2028. That means, according to Bernstein's estimates, the end of 2028 will be a better time to buy both the memory and storage in your rig than the next two years.

Whether this is wishful thinking is anyone's guess, but I'm certainly a bit sceptical of the specifics of this claim. A drop of any kind would be good for consumers, but both NAND and DRAM seem set for a large drop, according to Bernstein. SK hynix certainly looks set to increase output in the future, with it investing over $60 billion in chip plants in South Korea, and it's looking to triple chip output by 2034, but SK hynix and Samsung are both set to steadily increase production to 'minimize the risk of oversupply.'

It takes time to build the factories necessary to increase output, and these companies don't seem to be throwing all their funds at them. That said, they are still putting a lot of money into future output.

The problem here is that, even if the supply of DRAM manages to catch up with demand over the next two years (which is a big 'if'), there's no guarantee that the prices will suddenly drop as a result. It seems likely they will instead slowly decline over time. And that's before considering whether or not the AI industry will continue to expand by then, or how things like the launch of the next Sony and Microsoft consoles will impact consumer supply. For the sake of my rig, I hope that Bernstein is right though, and that my scepticism is unwarranted.

Just imagine you're Meta. You've spent millions of dollars on new servers that only use DDR5 sticks, only to find that you still don't have enough memory. The solution? Yoink the DDR4 modules out of the old servers and, through the power of a custom chip, splice the two systems together to go ham with RAM.

Even if you only have a little bit of knowledge about how CPUs and memory work together, you'll probably know that this shouldn't be possible. But as TechSpot reports, it can be done: you just need something to translate the DDR5-talk from the CPU to DDR4-lingo that the old memory sticks can understand.

Bridging the gap between the AMD Zen 5-powered Epyc processors and the last-gen memory tech is something called a Compute Express Link (CXL), with Meta's custom chip named Vistara. This manages the bundle of DDR4 sticks as a separate pool of memory, albeit one that's much slower than the main pool of DDR5.

You can read more about the specifics of how it all works in Meta's research paper (PDF warning) for Vistara and its so-called MemServers, but you can just think of it as being like a PCIe expansion card that hosts a big pile of DRAM. Because of the various latencies and lower bandwidth of DDR4, the software that operates Vistara keeps track of threads and data, using the older DRAM for 'cold storage'.

That's basically information that you want to keep nearby, rather than on an even slower SSD or HDD, as it might be needed at short notice. Data that's currently in use or might be required immediately is kept in 'hot storage', i.e. the Epyc processor's DDR5 memory.

The paper says that each MemServer node houses a 158-core AMD Epyc 9000-series chip, and it's either a custom processor (because no Epyc CPU has exactly 158 cores) or it has one or more core chiplets disabled for some reason. Anyway, the motherboard housing the processor sports 768 GB of DDR5-6400, which you'd think would be enough.

Not for Meta it isn't, hence the inclusion of 256 GB of DDR4-2400, handled by two Vistara expansion cards in PCIe 5.0 x8 slots. Together, that's a grand total of 1,024 GB or 1 TB of system memory. In other words, one MemServer should be just about okay to run Star Citizen.

Could you do the same in a gaming PC? Well, MSI's MEG X870E Godlike X Edition motherboard has two Gen5 PCIe slots connected to the CPU, so if Meta created Windows-based drivers for Vistara, you could technically jam an expansion card in there and load it up with cheaper DDR4. However, CXL isn't designed for general consumer PCs, and there isn't a desktop CPU that supports it.

But if memory prices remain sky-high for years to come, perhaps never returning to pre-2026 levels, then this could be one way to offset the enormous bill of having a decent amount of DRAM in your gaming PC. Of course, the cost of the Vistara card, a necessary motherboard, and a CXL-capable CPU would probably make it all pointless anyway.

Should DRAM prices actually fall back into the realms of common sense, and you go on the hunt for a big memory kit, just point to any tech news article from this year if anyone says "Hey, you know games don't need 96 GB of memory".

SK hynix, one of the three biggest memory manufacturers (along with Samsung and Micron), seems to be investing a lot of money into AI, and the South Korean government is happy to see that renewed investment. This time, it's to the tune of 100 trillion won (or $65 billion as of the time of writing).

As reported by Reuters, SK hynix is looking to build new chip plants with that funding, one of which will be for storage chips. 80 trillion won (around $52 billion) will be spent on NAND flash memory production, and 20 trillion won (around $13 billion) will be spent on a chip packaging plant that is estimated to be operational by late 2027.

South Korea is becoming one of the major players in the AI boom. Just last week, South Korea's president declared it will invest over half a trillion dollars into the AI chip industry, with SK hynix and Samsung accounting for much of that funding. And between them, they will be producing NAND and DRAM.

NAND memory is typically used just for storage, whereas traditional memory can be used in all sorts of applications. The memory crisis is putting a squeeze on pretty much everything, so SK hynix is likely looking to diversify as much as possible. It's a lucrative business too. Just a few weeks ago, Biwin signed a multi-year $2 billion deal for NAND memory to put in its SSDs, and that spells bad things for the state of the memory crisis.

If companies are making long-term deals, it suggests they think pricing will either stay the same or rise. It's not worth long-term commitments in a volatile market if they think the pricing will go down in that time.

Long-term chip plants also suggest companies think demand will continue for many more years, too. The memory crisis is suggested to run past 2028, at least, as both Samsung and SK hynix want to "minimize the risk of oversupply". Micron has also confirmed that demand is "significantly in excess of our available supply for the foreseeable future".

But not everything is doom and gloom. A former Samsung boss reckons the memory crisis could be over by the end of 2028 thanks to a surge in Chinese capacity. Still, even if the crisis ends by then, and supply manages to reach demand, that's no guarantee the price will fall quickly.

This is all to say that the memory crisis still seems some way off fizzling out, and companies are betting billions of dollars on that opinion.

With the memory crisis continuing to suck up supplies of memory and push up the cost of computing and gaming devices, a big question mark has lingered over the prices for the next consoles from Microsoft and Sony. And early reports suggest things won't be looking pretty for their launch.

As spotted by TechPowerUp, well-known hardware leaker KeplerL2 recently posted in a NeoGAF thread that the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the PlayStation 6 is currently $200 more than their last report, where they estimated it would cost $760. That means the current expected price of materials alone sits at around $960.

Naturally, this doesn't come from Sony, so a grain of salt is required, but KeplerL2's history as a hardware leaker is solid thus far.

Consoles sit in a unique place in the market. Because you need to use their software, and they get a cut of game sales, consoles have traditionally been sold at a loss or, if companies are lucky, they would barely break even. Where the Steam Machine has to make some sort of profit for Valve (explaining that hefty price tag), Sony and Microsoft care more about securing you as a long-term user.

With this in mind, the BOM estimate suggests the retail price of the PS6 will sit somewhere around the $900-$1000 mark, over double that of the PS5 at launch. The BOM does not factor in the price to build and ship the machine either. Sony could likely afford to take a small loss on these devices, but it seems the price tag isn't going to look pretty either way.

Sony is in a very awkward spot regarding its next console. It seems likely the memory crisis won't end in the next year at least, with it perhaps pushing past 2028, but pricing likely won't stabilise immediately, even when supply meets demand. This means even if the crisis suddenly ends by the end of 2028, we might not see prices return to normal until 2029 or 2030.

But the PS5 launched in 2020, and Sony has tended to upgrade every five or six years. So it either pushes out the next console with inflated memory prices in 2028, or waits another few years, having to restart research and development around new hardware so its machines don't lag behind the competition.

Even if Sony holds back its next console by a year or two, plenty of work done on designing the PS6 will have to go out the window to catch up with new hardware as it launches. So, like the Steam Machine launching at its astronomical price point, it's likely to just go ahead with it anyway. If you're waiting to get its next console, you'd better start saving soon.

AMD's latest line of GPUs barely followed MSRP at launch, and yet they may be set to get even pricier in the future.

As reported by Sweclockers, a poster took to Board Channels, a forum for communicating between manufacturers and partners, to share news of an AMD price increase. Effectively, it claims that Sapphire, Asus, and XFX have all been told that the supply price of GPU and video memory bundles from AMD will be bumped up by around 10% in July.

The post in question has been machine translated by Sweclockers, as the board primarily operates in Chinese, and it's otherwise difficult to get access to. It tends to be well vetted, so claims made on the forum tend to have some validity, though AMD haven't confirmed anything as of yet.

Historically AMD and Nvidia have provided graphics card manufacturers with the video memory in a bundle with the GPU. That made sense for the GPU manufacturer as it could take advantage of the economies of scale to buy that VRAM in bulk. However, the memory crisis has proven to be a thorn in the side of consumer PC hardware, and for every manufacturer, so those bundles are going up and it seems likely the end user will be the one paying at least some of the extra.

Though it's not absolutely guaranteed the reported 10% price increase will be passed on to the consumer, partners buying GPU bundles for manufacture won't want to take the price hit on their own, so they will likely adjust their own pricing to make up the difference.

As the price increase is expected to come into effect in July, partners should honour supply deals made prior to the change. So, any cards already in retailers, and those already in the manufacturing pipeline theoretically shouldn't be affected. That 10% increase won't be immediately visible, though it will likely hit us all eventually.

Late last year, it was rumoured Nvidia would stop bundling VRAM into its GPUs, leaving it up to partners to buy the GPU die alone and purchase the rest of the supporting cast themselves. It was theorised that would allow larger manufacturers, with wider relations to GDDR6/7 suppliers, to pick and choose where to buy their VRAM from, but the flip side is that smaller GPU vendors without those connections might struggle to compete.

So, while the price increase is a bummer, at least AMD is in some way helping support its smaller partners. Small crumbs, I know.

Unfortunately, with the memory crisis likely to go on for some time still, AMD probably isn't going to be bringing those prices back down any time soon. That means things are likely to get worse for hardware manufacturers and enthusiasts before they get any better.

As big-budget, blockbuster PC games have become increasingly more packed with cutting-edge graphics over the years, their minimum hardware requirements have naturally scaled upwards too. But there's one forthcoming game that has taken that quite a lot further than you'd expect, with the memory specs likely to cause more than a few raised eyebrows.

It's called Cinder City, and it's being made by one of NC Corporation's studios (Big Fire Games), a South Korean company better known for its many MMORPGs. As an "open-world cinematic third-person shooter set in a fallen near-future Seoul", you'd naturally expect the graphics to be all-singing, all-dancing, and the handful of images and footage I've seen all suggest that it's going to be heavy on your hardware.

A quick glance at the game's Steam listing suggests otherwise, as the recommended graphics card is merely a GeForce RTX 4060. However, to reach that point in the listing, your eyes will have passed over the minimum and recommended system memory requirements, and those are frankly absurd.

The bottom line amount is 32 GB, with the publishers recommending that your PC has 64 GB of DRAM.

Either there are a couple of mistakes in those specs or the game is an unholy mess of non-optimisation. The CPU and graphics card min specs of a Ryzen 5 3600 and GeForce RTX 2060 are in line with current games, but 32 GB of RAM certainly isn't. And it gets really odd with the recommended specs, as the CPU jumps to a Ryzen 7 7800X3D. That processor paired with an RTX 4060 makes no sense whatsoever.

But all of that pales in comparison to the 64 GB memory recommendation. That's at least $800 of DDR5 right there, and while there are plenty of PC gamers who loaded up their rigs when memory was cheap, few people are going to be doing that now in order to play Cinder City with high-level quality settings.

Although no confirmed release date has been given yet, there's still plenty of time for NC and BigFire Games to either correct the specs (assuming they're a mistake) or work on some optimisations to reduce the memory consumption. Cinder City is getting quite a bit of attention at the moment but perhaps not for the right reasons.

Apologies for yet another downbeat post about PC component shortages. But you don't often get insight from as significant a player—and one with quite the same track record for a certain brand of transparency—as Valve. It turns out the problem for the company regarding memory and storage for the new Steam Machine hasn't just been cost, but just getting hold of supply at all is a major challenge.

If you haven't already watched Andy and Jacob's recent interview with Valve's Steam Machine reps Pierre-Loup Griffais and Yazan Aldehayyat, may I suggest you get that done pronto, it's well worth a watch. But among other takeaways from the chat is insight into just how acute the memory and storage supply crisis has become.

You might have thought that it's just a pricing issue. In other words, paying more fixes the problem. But apparently not.

"Things that were a year ago, two years ago, commodity things," Griffais explains, "you'd just pay the normal price for it and it's all good, now you have to negotiate really hard just to secure a few thousand. And there's so many more people in line in front of you."

Griffais says Valve saw evidence of this problem before it fully impacted retail memory and SSD prices. "Most people have started to see this in the past six months. But we've been dealing with it for eight months to a year.

"Compared to the retail channel, we see —we're talking directly to suppliers of things that will get built and then will get put on shelves, and so we've had to deal with it a little bit ahead of everyone else in the public."

"It's a really weird climate right now for memory and storage," Griffais concludes. Indeed. Somehow, Valve still managed to build up sufficient stock to get the Steam Machine launched. But as we've already covered, it was touch and go for a bit. At the beginning of the year, it wasn't clear that they would have any Steam Machines to sell.

As it is, the Steam Machine has launched, but at that painful $1,049 price. You have to assume Valve would have loved to have pushed the Machine under $1,000, just for the optics of a three-digit sticker. So the fact that they went with the uglier $1,049 figure probably speaks volumes about just how tight the whole thing was.

Undoubtedly, it's all a bit of a pity. But until, and indeed if, the memory and storage market returns to something resembling normality, there's little to be done. We just have to suck it up. And maybe pay even more attention to saving money on the best deals for other components. May I suggest monitors? There are at least some stellar deals on those of late.

Unless you've been living on another planet, orbiting a star light years away, you won't have missed the fact that memory kits are painfully expensive right now. One of the world's biggest manufacturers of PCs has warned that the RAMpocalypse will continue for years, but so far, makers of DRAM kits have taken a somewhat binary approach in their responses to the crisis: do nothing or go extreme.

As reported by Computerbase, a forecast on the supply and prices of DRAM was presented by Lenovo at a high-performance computing event last week. It essentially told us something that we're already acutely aware of: Memory prices will remain extremely high for many years to come and may never drop back down to 2024 levels.

There's nothing that you and I can do about this, of course, but you'd perhaps expect the top manufacturers of memory kits to do something. We don't really need high-speed, low-latency sets of DRAM in our gaming PCs to enjoy decent frame rates, and anyone with an AMD Ryzen X3D chip can get away with surprisingly slow memory.

Yes, the 'sweet spot' for an AM5 socket chip is DDR5-6000 and anything with a CAS latency of 32 cycles or lower will feel really snappy and responsive. But slap a set of DDR5-5200 CL38 in there, and you won't actually notice unless the game is 100% memory-limited. There are some genuine scenarios where it will, but gaming isn't one of them.

So you'd think that to offer some relief in the current DRAM situation, memory kit makers would be doing their best to churn out slower sets that are more affordable than those currently on offer.

However, a quick browse through recent newsroom posts shows that this isn't happening. If anything, DDR5 kit manufacturers are either keeping totally silent on the whole problem or going in the opposite direction, releasing ultra-fast sets that are so niche that hardly anyone would be buying them, even if the RAMpocalypse didn't exist.

You want examples? How about G.Skill's DDR5-9200 CL72 kit, or the DDR5-8000 CL64 set from Geil. Even Team Group, a brand that normally offers some great products in the mainstream PC market, announced a DDR5-8000 CL54 set. Kingston and Lexar, on the other hand, have stayed quiet on the whole memory front.

The really fast DRAM kits are CUDIMM ones, i.e. they use a small chip on the memory PCB to boost the clock signal, so they will only work in an Intel LGA 1851 socket motherboard. Even then, not every Arrow Lake processor will be happy to run its memory controller at ludicrous speed, though the latest 200K Plus chips stand the best chance, as they natively support DDR5-7200.

Unless you're pairing a Core Ultra 7 270K Plus with an RTX 5090 and game at 1080p, you won't notice much difference in performance, though. That's because memory bandwidth isn't a limiting factor in a game's frame rate, or at least, not unless the CPU and GPU are so fast that they just blitz through the workloads.

G.Skill says that its memory technologies evolve to "support PC gaming, content creation, AI workloads, and professional computing applications", but I can count the number of scenarios where having an Intel desktop PC with DDR5-9200 is going to be crucially faster than one with DDR5-6400, for example, on a single hand.

To be fair to all of the aforementioned memory makers, they're in a position where they're going to be damned if they do release ultra-fast, ultra-expensive kits, and damned if they don't. In the case of the latter, memory is the primary market for G.Skill and Geil, so they have to be seen to be doing something to keep the business in the news and interest ticking along.

But I suspect that this time next year, when the grim realities of the RAMpocalypse have ripped through the PC industry like a tornado in the plains of Texas, the market will be so desperate for affordable memory that kit makers will have no choice but to field slower, cheaper options.

If they don't, this sector of the industry will almost certainly be saying goodbye to a raft of names that have been synonymous with PC gaming for a very long time.

The memory supply crisis has been raging since at least last year with no end in sight—some even predict prices will rise by as much as 50% in Q3 of 2026. Supplies are scarce and prices are high in part due to the AI industry scooping up everything it can get its many fingered hands on. However, a class-action lawsuit alleges another cause: collusion and price-fixing.

Filed in the US district court of Northern California, the complaint alleges "concerted anticompetitive behavior by three Oligopolists" in the DRAM market, naming Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron specifically (via Law360). The suit has been filed by a 'proposed class' of businesses and individual consumers.

The complaint goes on to allege that, since 2022, the three memory manufacturers have "fixed supply and prices for DRAM, engaging in conduct that makes no economic sense absent collusion and that has driven up the price of conventional DRAM (sometimes called commodity DRAM) approximately 700% in a four-year period."

The suit alleges collusion, claiming, "None of the three used the others’ retreat to expand and win customers. All three pulled back together."

According to the argument laid out in the complaint, the named manufacturers "simultaneously cut production, coordinated a pivot to [High Bandwidth Memory often used in data centres] and exit from DDR3 and DDR4, and otherwise decreased and locked up conventional DRAM supply while prices charged up with mind-blowing scale and rapidity."

The complaint cites Micron's shuttering of its consumer sub-brand Crucial as one example of artificially cutting supply, alleging this closure happened "at the most profitable price point in its history."

The suit, filed this past Thursday, follows hot on the heels of Apple announcing a slew of price increases across its MacBook and iPad products. The company said at the time, "We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly."

As for gaming PCs, the price of RAM kits has massively spiked. The cost of memory has also driven up the price of gaming laptops too, with many models instead opting for either single channel or simply less RAM overall (hence why you might see sensibly priced 16 GB machines more often than 32 GB models). Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have all significantly increased the price of their respective consoles too.

Even major players like Apple can do little to challenge big time memory manufacturers, and the California class-action lists a number of practical reasons why not. "No new entrant can discipline [Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron] in the conventional DRAM market," the complaint reads, "A single modern DRAM fab costs fifteen to twenty billion dollars and takes years to build; the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines it requires come from one supplier in the Netherlands, committed years ahead to the incumbents; the process recipes that make a fab yield usable chips comprise decades of accumulated trade secrets."

In the context of the US specifically, the complaint also criticises how local export controls "bar the only other producers, in China, from acquiring current-generation equipment." The suit argues that as a result of this and all of the above, "no outsider can expand output to undercut" any of the named three companies.

As a result, this lawsuit is seeking both damages and "injunctive relief" that would require an end to the alleged anticompetitive practices. To date, neither Micron, Samsung, nor SK Hynix have issued an official comment in response.

Though it seems likely that, due to the length of time required to increase capacity, these companies will argue the crisis would have materialised regardless due to outsized demand. After all, new multi-billion dollar fabs aren't built overnight, and demand is still so high that even TSMC's next-gen Arizona fab is fully booked before it has even been built.

The memory apocalypse has already hit prices of RAM and SSDs as AI data centres buy up all the available stock, and it's only going to get worse according to Jefferies Equity Research. As reported by Wccftech, memory prices are likely to go up between 40 and 50% in the third quarter of 2026, and then another 30 to 40% in the fourth quarter, followed by a 40–45% increase year-on-year in 2027.

Jefferies is only predicting a recovery thanks to increased production in 2028, and even then, only of around 15–20%. While former Samsung boss Kyung-Hyeon Kye predicted an earlier end to the memory crisis thanks to an increase in Chinese manufacturing, now it seems like Chinese memory isn't actually selling for less.

At the moment, the memory apocalypse has mainly been a downer for anyone looking to build a new PC or pick up a Steam Machine. But Apple recently announced it's jacking up the price of iPads and Macbooks by hundreds of dollars, and iPhones won't be far behind. It'll be interesting to see whether ordinary folks still think it's worth building data centres to make coding easier for some programmers when it means they can't afford a new phone.

Basically, the AI bubble can't burst soon enough. And given that OpenAI lost $38.53 billion in 2025, there's at least some hope on that front. Whether it means the price of memory will actually go back down, or just stay at whatever the new normal becomes, remains to be seen.

Apple has bitten the bullet. The house that Steve Jobs built took its store offline a little earlier. When it came back, punters were confronted with a bleak new reality: Macs and iPads are now hundreds of dollars dearer. Here's a tasting platter of new starting prices:

• The MacBook Air now starts at $1,299, up from $1,099,
• The MacBook Pro now starts at an eye-watering $1,999, up from $1,699.
• The MacBook Neo will now set you back a minimum of $699, up from its original price of $599.
• The iPad Air now starts at $749, up from $599
• The iPad Pro now starts at $1,199, up from $999
• If you were gonna splurge, get ready to splurge all the more: the M4 Max Mac Studio is up to $2,499 from $1,999

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Until now, Apple had managed to be the one exception to the memory crisis. Even as the waters rose for everyone else, the company's prices generally stayed firm, held steady by one of the most valuable corporations on Earth's relationship with suppliers and, perhaps, the fact it already prices its tech to make a comfy profit for itself at the best of times.

"We have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices,” Apple said in a statement picked up by the Wall Street Journal. “We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly."

At least for now, Apple is not increasing the price of the iPhone, its number-one moneymaker, but it certainly hasn't said it won't do that. Indeed, just last week outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook told the WSJ that "Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable… we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable."

For as much as I am certain Apple likes making money, it's not happy about this (much like Valve is not happy about the expensive price of its new Steam Machine). In that same interview, Cook said that "We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line." Amen to that, Tim.

Ah, good old PC memory: can't live without it, can't avoid the RAMpocalypse price tags, either. Some tech companies would like you to believe that 8 GB is fine, but you try running the latest, graphics-heavy games with that amount of DRAM. Generally speaking, you want 16 GB, and if you like to use lots of apps while you game, then 32 GB is preferable.

With that in mind, I've been scouring through all the Prime Day sales to find the cheapest DDR4 and DDR5 memory kits worth buying.

• We're curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals here

I've got 16 and 32 GB options for both, plus a few others if you're happy to pay a bit more for a kit with extras, that get the most from your gaming PC. What you won't find are any 48 GB or larger sets, and that's because they're all so expensive right now that it makes little sense to buy one just for gaming.

Don't believe me? Well, the cheapest 48 GB kit I've found is $580 at Newegg, and when it comes to 64 GB, then you're looking at spending $800 at Newegg, at the very least. So...ah...don't.

DDR4 memory kits

The only reason why any PC gamer would be considering either of these DDR4 memory kits is if you're building a cheap entry-level rig at the moment. In that case, sticking with an AMD Ryzen 5000-series processor and AM4 motherboard is the best way to keep the cost right down.

That said, if you're currently rocking such a CPU in your gaming PC and you want to give it a bit more memory, then swapping a 16 GB kit for a 32 GB one makes sense. You could sell the old set to recoup some of the cost, or keep hold of it just in case the new one ever fails at some point in the near future.

DDR5 memory kits

If your gaming PC houses an AMD Ryzen 7000-, 8000-, or 9000-series processor, or an Intel Core Ultra chip, you have to use DDR5 memory because all of these CPUs lack support for DDR4. Paying almost twice as much money for a 16 GB DDR5-6000 kit as for a 16 GB DDR4-3200 set is painful to see, but there's nothing we can do about it right now.

Fortunately, both of these memory kits are perfectly decent. They're not the flashiest or fastest you can buy, but they are the cheapest. That does mean some elements of them might be a tad wonky, e.g. the heatsinks on the Patriot set are a bit flimsy, but it doesn't affect the cooling.

Other DDR5 memory kits

If you're okay with spending $350 on a 32 GB DDR5 memory kit (and by that, I just mean you've accepted the horrendous price tag because the alternative is just to give up on having a PC...), then paying up to 14% more perhaps isn't so daunting.

Should that increase be within your means, you can pick up either a super-snappy set for an AMD setup or something that's still plenty fast enough but has bling for days. Corsair's Vengeance kit is arguably the prettiest one out of all the memory kits I've listed here, but you do have to pay more for the spanglies.

I'm not expecting to see any major deals on RAM kits over the coming Prime Day, due to the ongoing memory crisis. However, there are some bundles that help alleviate the worst of RAM pricing today. Such as this Gigabyte/Corsair bundle at Newegg.

The bundle deal includes:

• Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice
• DDR5-6000 32 GB (2x 16 GB) RAM

All for $515.

The motherboard alone costs $260 on Newegg (or another seller has it for $234). We reviewed this exact model at the start of last year, awarding it a score of 84% for its great upgradeability and clean look. It's a great fit for any Ryzen 7000-series or 9000-series chip.

The RAM kit is listed for $440 on Newegg. I've also had a look around on Amazon for comparable kits, and even the cheaper options, such as this Lexar Thor Z kit, are $400. That means you're saving around $185–$119 with this bundle deal, which takes some of the pain out of the current PC building crisis—though not all.

• We're keeping track of all the early Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

It's a good RAM kit. At 6000 MT/s, it's running at the ideal speed for an AM5 processor to get the most out of it, and 32 GB is plenty for any modern machine for a good while yet. It's also rated to a CAS latency of 36, which is perfectly suitable for a gaming rig.

It's also a white kit, which matches the motherboard. Though Newegg does offer a separate bundle for anyone looking for more traditional black build. It includes a MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi and Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 kit, but it's a little more expensive.

These aren't the prices we want to see in any case, but we're working with what's available at the moment. If you're looking to build your own PC and facing the fright of inflated price tags, at least a bundle deal makes things just a little bit better.

👉 Check out the rest of Newegg's motherboard deals 👈

The memory crisis has fundamentally changed how we approach memory and storage. It has made consumers adjust expectations about how much capacity they can get, and for what cost, and for companies like Biwin, it has meant having to purchase billions worth of NAND flash memory years in advance just to make sure it has a good supply.

Biwin is in a funny place, being a DRAM kit and SSD manufacturer. Even though the increased demand means it can almost guarantee selling all of its stock, it too will be hit by the supply crisis when it comes to securing precious memory chips. Biwin does not produce its own NAND flash memory, but it does need it for its products.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, it has signed a two-year deal to give $1.86 billion to an unnamed NAND supplier in exchange for an agreed volume of chips.

That supply will start flowing as of June 30, 2026. Both the pricing and quantity are fixed, which means if the price goes up over time, it's not paying a variable spot price. It's potentially a smart move from Biwin, but if the price happens to go down, then it would be overpaying for that stock.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, that $1.86 billion figure is more than half of Biwin's annual revenue. That is both a testament to how big its revenue now is, due to the memory crisis, and a sign of how big that commitment is.

Chances are, this long-term deal will be beneficial for Biwin as there's no sign of the memory crisis stopping soon. AMD's global vice president and general manager of the client channel business, David McAfee, recently told us that he hopes it ends in the next few years. He noted that the big three memory manufacturers— Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix—are all working on increasing production.

We were told, "I think we'll start to see by the end of next year and into 2028 that that ramp really starts to take hold, and then it's just a factor of the forces of supply and demand, and how that affects memory prices."

However, SK hynix and Samsung are both trying to minimise risk by not ramping up production too hard, just in case demand drops suddenly (*cough* AI bubble popping *cough*). Still, the commitment to at least two years of NAND at such a high figure is a sign that Biwin likely thinks the memory crisis isn't ending in at least the next two years, and that seems to be a common thought among manufacturers right now.

Any news on the current global memory crisis probably seems like a stuck record right now, but SK hynix reckons it has some good news for us: Its plans for constructing new chip factories have managed to shave ten years off the projected completion date. The only problem is that it's only brought it to 2034.

Talking to Nikkei Asia (via Computerbase), SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won explained that the construction of four new facilities had been originally expected to finish by 2045, but that it has now managed to bring that date closer to home, with the current target now being 2034.

However, Chey shot down any hopes you might have of it being done even sooner, saying, "There is currently no way to move faster than this."

But to counter that disappointment, he also claimed that with everything all up and running, production levels would be even better. "Since we're proceeding with the plan to expand as much as possible, our calculations show that our wafer capacity will double within five years. But honestly, once all these facilities are built, it won't just double, it will triple by around 2034".

There's no denying that this is good news as far as the long-term is concerned, but it means absolutely nothing for the current memory crisis, where the demand for DRAM and NAND flash outweighs supply so much that memory prices have quadrupled since this time last year.

One could also argue that the construction and output update from SK hynix could make the present situation worse, because if the world's second-largest memory chip manufacturer isn't able to ramp up its output any time soon, the demands from AI companies are likely to take up even more of its limited production capacity.

Prices for DDR4/5 kits and SSDs have been relatively stable for the past month or so, but with vendors already warning of further increases, which strongly suggests that this is indeed what's going to happen. All we can do is look after our hardware as best as possible, and hope it lasts long enough for a replacement or upgrade to become affordable again.

Either that or set up a second retirement fund, just for a 1 TB SSD.

Neighbour shot my PC through the wall from r/pcmasterrace

It's not every day you hear about a PC incidentally saving someone's life. It's even rarer that you hear about a dog shooting a gun. Somehow, this morning on the PCMR Subreddit, one user shared their own harrowing experience, which is a horrid mix of the two.

User angelbabyzz took to the Subreddit to share a picture of their PC, with a bullet hole shot clean through their motherboard (and to add even more horror, straight through their RAM too). In the middle of the night, they were woken up by a gunshot and pieces of tempered glass hitting their face. The tempered glass side panel of their PC was now scattered all over their room having been shattered by a bullet.

Their teary-eyed neighbour came to check on them, "in a complete mess sobbing and shaking and terrified that she had hurt someone" and claiming their dog had somehow accidentally discharged her gun. That shot had passed through the wall and hit the PC in the redditor's room. "The police said that the PC changed the trajectory of the bullet," writes the OP, "and it would have hit me while I was sleeping if the PC hadn’t been there."

It reportedly took three days to clean up all of the glass, and though they are both hoping the neighbour's insurance will cover the PC, the neighbour has agreed to cover the price of the rig if not.

There's naturally a lot of scepticism in the original thread about whether the dog actually caused the discharge of the gun, with the top comment claiming it's a new version of the "dog ate my homework" excuse. Logistically, the thought of a paw somehow getting into the trigger certainly gives pause (paws?) for thought, and if the firearm is faulty enough to go off without touching the trigger, that rings even louder alarm bells. It certainly suggests the gun's safety mechanism was off or not working, either way.

The redditor says, "While I’m not sure about the dog story, it’s very clear from how she responded at the time that it was an accident. She was more messed up about it than I was and could barely speak from crying so hard and her whole body was shaking, and she just kept apologising over and over."

The redditor also claims that they feel the neighbour has paid "her dues" with a criminal charge, confiscation of her gun, the cost of replacing everything, and the constant apologies.

The redditor hopes to rebuild their PC but the memory in their machine has likely risen in price over time, so here's hoping they're still able to get a similarly powerful rig that doesn't cost the earth. But, a gun going off and through a wall with no death or injury is just short of a miracle, even if the memory crisis will make replacing the PC much harder.

If you've tried to buy RAM for your PC at some point in the last year or so, there's a good chance you've noticed a monumental leap in price. Well, with the explosion of AI, it has taken much of the market's supply of memory with it. The good news is that an AMD head is hopeful we will see DDR5 supplies ramp up greatly at some point in the next two years, as long as demand doesn't ramp up at the same rate.

Recently, we had the chance to interview David McAfee, AMD's global vice president and general manager of the client channel business, who talked about the problem. Despite recently releasing an updated DDR4-supporting CPU, he notes that DDR4 production has dropped over the last few years, and manufacturers have largely moved over to producing DDR5 instead.

"I think that the thing that gives me hope is that there are a couple of things that we know. Right, one of the things that we know is there is an enormous amount of capacity that is being built by the memory manufacturers to bring more production online, and that more production online is going to focus on DDR, LPDDR, HBM, like the newer memory technologies."

"I don't expect a lot of DDR4 production to come back into the world, but those newer memory technologies, a significant amount of capacity is coming online," says McAfee. "I think we'll start to see by the end of next year and into 2028 that that ramp really starts to take hold, and then it's just a factor of the forces of supply and demand, and how that affects memory prices."

"The demand side of this cycle of memory is quite unusual, right, with server refresh[es], with the AI supercycle on top of it, it's very different, and so I think the bigger question is, even with all this capacity coming online, is it enough to satisfy what this AI supercycle demands?"

McAfee is not alone in hoping memory supplies could potentially normalise in the next few years. Kyung-Hyeon Kye, a former Samsung boss, reckons a surge in Chinese memory in the second half of 2027 will help supply return to normal.

Just a few months ago, Micron confirmed demand was "significantly in excess of our available supply for the foreseeable future" and suggested its Tongluo-based semiconductor facility wouldn't "support meaningful product shipments" until at least 2028.

But then, even attempting to meet supply carries risk for manufacturers. Samsung and SK hynix opted to "minimise the risk" of oversupply at the end of 2025, suggesting the crisis would be pushing through past 2028. Both are working on new fabs, with SK Hynix expecting its Chengju and Indiana HBM facilities to be operational by late 2028.

McAfee acknowledges this fear from Samsung and SK hynix. "You look over decades of history with memory manufacturers, and they make billions during cycles where there's more demand than supply, and they lose billions of dollars when there's more supply than demand."

And, even before it normalises, we could see prices go up more. Just a few weeks ago, Team Group's CEO warned that DRAM and SSD prices would rise going forward, whilst stating that the majority of memory produced between 2026 and 2027 already had customers.

More HBM memory does mean the need for more traditional memory from AI firms would go down, but IEEE Spectrum reports that this won't have an immediate impact on price. Even as companies catch up with demand, we can't expect prices to all go down at once. And that doesn't take into account any increases in AI development going forward. If demand continues to rise, it will be harder for supply to keep up with it.

The market is so volatile that it's literally anyone's guess, but companies appear to be trying to scale to meet the challenge of AI resource demand, without scaling so hard that they pop if the AI bubble does. Until then, we PC gamers will have to suffer the costs of all that tech growth. That and PC builders who appear to be just bracing until it all goes back to normal.

Despite a rough couple of years for the company, Intel could be set to make a turnaround with both its handheld chips performing well, and its Foundry business taking on substantial orders, at least if recent reports prove to be true. It seems like the AI boom has really squeezed semiconductor leader TSMC's supplies dry, and Intel is now being tapped to provide some chips in its place.

As reported by The Information, Google has reportedly ordered at least three million chip orders from Intel, in the form of TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), according to two people familiar with the company. This Google-designed unit is specifically created for use in neural network machines. In case that sounds like gibberish, it's basically Google, yet again, further committing to AI.

These TPUs not only go towards developing Google's own AI services but will also be sold to companies like Apple and Meta. Google is reportedly expected to make more than six million TPUs between 2027 and 2028, so it will presumably be relying on both TSMC and Intel to provide the facilities to help make these chips.

TSMC is the world's leading semiconductor manufacturer, and Intel's biggest competition. So, in a sense, the ongoing memory crisis sucking up all the resources is somewhat beneficial to Intel, which may not have been able to make such a deal if TSMC were able to meet demand. That's before mentioning that the TPU demand wouldn't be so high without the AI boom.

As well as this, Nvidia is reportedly testing Intel to see if its chips can be used in its next major project, seemingly its next GPU architecture. Currently codenamed Feynman, it supposedly combines four graphics chips into one unit, so if Intel can win the contract, that could be just one more step in establishing the Foundry's foothold in the gaming market.

Nvidia is reportedly TSMC's biggest buyer, beating out Apple, which used to be at the top of the list, with the company providing the chips in all of its phones, laptops, and tablets. However, TSMC has been struggling to meet demand for a while now. It is now reportedly sold out until at least 2028, with even its Arizona fab being fully booked before it is even built.

Just last year, TSMC announced a $100 billion investment plan into three US-based fabs, but it's not the only one with expansion plans. Just last week, Intel seemingly started targeting a $3.3 billion factory in India. It seems both companies have big plans to ride the AI wave as far as it will take them.

One can only hope that this extra investment will contribute to stabilising supply sooner, rather than later. I can't hold out on upgrading my PC forever.

Galax's Hall of Fame (HOF) range has traditionally been loud and pricey, but its prototype next-gen GPU design at this year's Computex might be over the top, even for Galax. That's because its latest design uses Swarovski crystals for a unique look (and presumably a unique look if it ever makes it to market).

As spotted by Smizu_OC on X (via VideoCardz), Galax showed off this card beside two equally eye-grabbing RTX 5080 designs. The potential RTX 6090 in question is simply called a "next generation concept design" at its Computex booth, so one could argue it's an RTX 50-series Super prototype of some kind. But Nvidia would have to actually launch that series for this to happen, which seems pretty unlikely at this point.

It's not clear yet how many Swarovski crystals are being used in the prototype, but there are crystal-like shapes in each corner of the GPU, so one can assume what those are. There are some on the back of the card, too, but without more information on the specific crystals, it's hard to say exactly how much it's worth.

I was sort of hoping it would look a little nicer, to be honest. I like the all-white look, but the crystals more or less feel slapped on. It reminds me of when I used to throw any old sticker onto my electric guitar just to cover up the horrible Fender knock-off I started with.

The concept isn't all about the looks, though. A placard to the left mentions a fully customised PCB with custom components, as well as proprietary fans, a quad fan configuration, and a large vapour chamber. It also mentions new HOF AI software for monitoring GPU temperature and RGB effects.

Speaking of AI, the sheer decadence of this card feels fitting for Computex but also a tad tone deaf, given that many cannot afford an RTX card right now. The explosion of AI into the mainstream has taken much of the memory with it and is threatening the supply of other components, too.

Still, decadence is part of the HOF series' "thing", so it's not too out of character, and Galax is likely looking for a marketing win right now, too. Just last month, it was announced that Galax would be entirely controlled by its parent company, Palit, but not before it was first suggested that the entire company would be closing (this turned out to be a miscommunication, according to Palit).

Still, a prototype is just that: something intended to show off. We have no guarantee we'll actually be able to buy what Galax has been cooking up, even if we could afford it (which, let's face it, we probably can't).

If you were hoping that memory vendors would offer some relief from the RAMpocalypse at this year's Computex, then I have some good news and bad news for you. Biwin has a new memory brand and a magnificent range of DDR5 kits heading our way, but with the biggest kit comparable to an RTX 5090 on price, few of us will get the chance to enjoy them.

Our two hardware editors, Dave and Jacob, are currently battling through the crowds at the annual tech-splurge event, and at a time when I was probably fast asleep, they were checking out Biwin's stand, replete with a host of DRAM goodies. The China-based company has been producing memory and storage solutions since 2010, so while its name might not be super familiar to PC gamers, it does make stuff for other brands, such as Acer, HP, and Lenovo.

Anyway, it turns out that not only does it have a new memory brand, Origin Code, it also has a series of DDR5 kits that are very much an anachronism in today's memory-mangled market.

At the top of the range is a 256 GB kit of dual-channel DDR5-8000 CL42 CQDIMMs, which look somewhat understated in design, but stuffed into any Arrow Lake rig, they'd banish any concerns of running out of memory. Last year, I reviewed a 128 GB Crucial CUDIMM kit, which was rated to DDR5-6400 CL52, so we're looking at a substantial improvement in transfer rate and memory timings.

For the PC gamer who simply must have a maxed-out, loaded-to-the-hilt rig, you couldn't ask for anything better. Well, maybe one thing, and that's the small matter of the price tag. Apparently, it will cost somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000.

If, for some unfathomable reason, that's just a wee bit too expensive for your tastes, then you could always pick one of Origin Code's more 'normal' DDR5 kits. For example, it has multiple sets that comply with AMD's new EXPO ULL standard. They're all sporting a CAS latency of 26 cycles and range from 32 GB DDR5-6200 (no, that's not a typo) up to 96 GB DDR5-6000.

However, there's absolutely no guarantee that your gaming PC will be happy to run with DRAM timings that tight. In fact, Biwin itself couldn't get its test platform (AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Dark Hero) to go that low, bottoming out at CL28. The same was true of the 256 GB CQDIMM setup, with the platform only managing CL64, despite the CL42 rating of each module.

So unless you have a super-stable PC, the best latencies might be out of reach, making the DRAM kit somewhat pointless. Admittedly, motherboard vendors may come to the rescue with appropriate BIOS updates, but even then, there's the small matter of having the money to purchase such a DRAM kit in the first place.

I don't know what the smaller/slowest DDR5 sets are being targeted at, price-wise, but given that the cheapest 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit I've seen of late is $380, you just know that the Origin Code stuff is going to be very pricey. But hey, at least you get a funky DRAM cooler in the box with some of the kits, so that's something, right?

Original story, 03 June 2026: There I was thinking that Computex 2026 was severely lacking in the coolness department, and then I saw Corsair show off a PC build that looks a bit like a cyberpunk samurai sword. Now, I know that may read as cringe to some, but I'd also like to remind you that cringe is dead and you are free.

Anyway, the showfloor PC build shows off Corsair's limited edition Shugo DDR5-6000 memory, with multiple lit-up sticks seated in the sword's spinning hilt. To my endless envy, Gizmodo Japan went 'hands-on' with the build, wielding the light-up blade and turning on the machine by placing the very much two-handed sword back in its PC pedestal.

Though Corsair announced a number of fresh components at this year's Computex, this particular PC build is one of a kind. Gizmodo Japan wrote on X that the heatsink lights up too, while AKIBA PC Hotline! shares that apparently Corsair Japan's initial concept for this build was originally meant to be even more ambitious.

Beyond that, I can tell you there are four sticks of Corsair's Shugo RAM seated in the sword's rotating hilt—though one 32 GB kit of this limited-edition memory will set you back about $600 (thanks, memory supply crisis). Otherwise, there's not much info available about how Corsair's katana kit works without any visible wires, or what components are inside. Here's hoping Corsair Japan offers a peek behind the curtain some time after the show.

On the subject of Corsair staying sharp, the company also announced the 'Nightsword.' However, this isn't anything like an RGB blade and is actually a gaming mouse with a dedicated Stream Deck button (Corsair has owned streaming brand Elgato since 2018). With a 33K DPI sensor and 8,000 Hz polling rate, this lightweight mouse will set you back $130.

The company also showed off a military-themed PC case with fighter jet controls, and a see-through PSU I'm still trying to get my head around. But when it comes to PC cases, I tend to go for something a little more on the cute side—a preference which darkFlash was only too happy to indulge with its co-branded Sanrio PC cases this year.

But surprisingly, rigs with actual detachable swords are nothing new at Computex; last year, I wrote about this incredible Palico PC with an RTX 5070 Ti GPU sword. Impractical? Sure, but no less impressive. As for this year's Computex, I think it's safe to say Corsair's cyberpunk samurai sword PC is my 'rule of cool' highlight of the show.

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X is undeniably a great device, but it's an expensive one. So when I saw Asus had unveiled an upgraded anniversary edition, bundled with a pair of AR glasses, I felt a little pain for my bank account.

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X20 bundle includes an Xbox ROG Ally X with a snazzy black and gold theming (including a 'custom gold internal structure'), TMR thumbsticks, and even the addition of a 7.4-inch OLED screen.

For context, the standard ROG Xbox Ally X comes with a 7-inch IPS LCD screen, so this is already a major upgrade. Both screens have a 120 Hz refresh rate. The TMR thumbsticks are a welcome addition, meaning you're less likely to have to take the thing apart due to stick drift. TMR sticks should also make for a slightly better battery life, too.

Finally, it comes with a new D-Pad that can be swapped between four-way and eight-way input.

In the new models, you can expect almost the same processor (the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme in the X20 has an NPU, but other than that, it's exactly the same as the Ryzen Z2 Extreme), which means pretty much identical game performance, as well as 24 GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 1 TB SSD, and an 80 Wh battery. The X20 is around 40 g heavier, but everything else remains the same.

Unfortunately, we don't know the answer to the biggest questions here. We don't have a confirmed price point or a release date. There are some random numbers on the side of the page when you get to the 20th anniversary section, so they could correlate, or they could… not.

As for price, I'm expecting a very heavy hit here. Not only are you getting some meaningful upgrades on the original $1,000 Xbox Ally X, but you're also adding in a pair of ROG XReal R1 AR glasses, which fetch around $1,000 by themselves. This is all before mentioning that the ongoing memory crisis has been a major pain when it comes to reasonably priced hardware, and 24 GB of memory is quite a lot.

The sell for this X20 bundle is the pairing of the glasses and the handheld. You can plug the 240 Hz glasses into the top and get what appears to be a 171-inch screen right in front of you. It is tethered to the device, though, so you likely won't be whipping out that bad boy on the train. Given what I expect its cost to be, I wouldn't want to bring it out of the house anyway.

After being rumoured to do so for a few weeks now, AMD has confirmed it is indeed bringing back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with AM4 10-year anniversary packaging, as well as a mid-range AM5 Ryzen 7 7700X3D chip.

From the top, the 5800X3D originally launched in 2022, but the updated model (celebrating 10 years of AM4) comes bundled with a Carbice ice pad and retails at $349. Offering eight cores and 96 megabytes of 3D V-Cache, it's still a decent AM4 CPU, and its compatibility with DDR4 is what may make it worth many thirsty PC Gamers' while. In AMD's press material, it announces the 5800X3D as the "return of the king".

If you're not looking to upgrade to AM5 or get DDR5 memory (thanks, memory crisis), the $349 MSRP is still a little under what you can expect to pay second-hand right now. Still, though, it feels like a lot for an older chip. It's just another sign of how bad the memory crisis has become, but it doesn't seem like a terrible buy if you simply have to build a PC right now.

The 2022 CPU 2022 got an 81% from us in our AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D review. Our Dave praised its 3D V-Cache and the chip's efficiency, but critiqued its heat and price point (which was at the time $450). The 10-year anniversary edition will be available from June 25 this year, and I'm sure that ice pad will be a welcome addition.

Alongside this, AMD has announced the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, an eight-core 120W AM5 chip coming in at $329. It will be available as soon as July 16, and comes with a boost clock of up to 4.5 GHz. With 16 threads and 104 MB of cache, it seems like a bit of a tough sell so far; it drops 500 MHz from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which only fetches tens of dollars more at Amazon (around $370 as of the time of writing).

And this is all assuming you will actually get your hands on the chip at MSRP. As we've seen over the last few years, MSRP is no guarantee. Still, more options on the market, and more ways of using the same hardware are usually better for the customer—If you have more options to choose from, you can actually afford to shop around.

Alongside this, AMD has announced it will continue to support AM5 through 2029, so at least if you do make that upgrade to AM5 with the 7700X3D, you know you've got a few more years with it than you may have otherwise expected.

Prise open any random gaming PC, and you'll be greeted with the common sight of a big cooler on the CPU and GPU, replete with multiple fans and maybe even a coolant loop. But when it comes to the DRAM sticks, you'll just mostly see a few pieces of metal for a heatsink. Enter stage left, Cooler Master and G.Skill, with their new actively cooled MasterDimm DDR5 kits, perfectly pitched at today's economy.

With announcements from both firms posted on X, you can see for yourself what the new memory sticks will look like. I have to say that I like the look of them, though I do wonder just how effective that fan is, given that it's small and shallow, and in a dual-channel setup, one of them is going to have far less airflow to work with than the other.

Ultra-fast DDR5 can run pretty toasty. For example, when I tested Corsair's 48 GB DDR5-8400 CUDIMM kit last year, I recorded a noticeably higher temperature in my stress test, compared to a 'standard' DDR5 set. That said, it wasn't exceptionally high and well within tolerances, so I'm not entirely convinced that we really need active cooling for memory sticks.

Of course, the collaboration could only be for really fast stuff, such as DDR5-9600, but even then, G.Skill just uses its standard heatsinks for its absolute fastest memory kit.

As you've possibly already gathered from the headline to this article, none of this is what's bothering me about this announcement. It's that the whole thing just seems like the two companies are being completely oblivious to the current state of the DRAM market. Even the most enthusiastic of PC enthusiasts is unlikely to be asking for actively cooled memory; they, and everyone else, just want DDR5 that's sensibly priced.

Over at Amazon, the cheapest 32 GB G.Skill dual-channel kit is a whopping $429, and it's even more expensive at Newegg. Go back in time by eight months or so, and you only had to pay around $90 for the same memory, roughly 79% cheaper than it is now (or, if you prefer the figures the other way around, the price has risen by 376%).

I have no doubts that some people out there will snap up a set of MasterDimms, the moment they become available, either for bragging rights or because they plan on overclocking the twangers off the kit the moment it's jammed into their PCs. But that's surely going to be a very small number of people, and certainly a demand lost in the cacophony of pleas for affordable DRAM.

I greatly fear that this is going to be a common theme at this year's Computex event, where instead of seeing all kinds of innovative ways of beating back the RAMpocalypse, we'll just get a flood of tone-deaf launches, all pretending that everything is just fine and dandy. With luck, the MasterDimm announcement will just be an isolated case, but if not…Well, let's not go there.

If you recognise the name 'Anbernic', it's likely because you've had your eyes on the company's gorgeous retro gaming handhelds. You might want to think twice before buying one, though, as some folks have accused it of quietly downgrading the DDR4 memory to DDR3 and cutting memory size in half, with Anberic reportedly only denying the latter part of that allegation.

As reported by our friends over at Tom's Hardware, a user on Reddit noted that the Anbernic RG 34XXSP they bought reportedly came with 512 MB of LPDDR3 memory, instead of the 1 GB advertised on the website.

A quick look through an archive of the Anbernic websites shows the RG 34XXSP used to advertise 2 GB of LPDDR4 memory, but now merely says 1 GB. Speaking to Tom's Hardware, Anbernic says "the current standard memory capacity is 1GB" and that the 512 MB model was "an unexpected error". It also claims it will "assist with a replacement as a priority" for anyone affected.

That means anyone who has bought an Anbernic device recently should check that it does indeed have the advertised memory. As noted on Reddit, the downgrade to 512 MB of memory is "low enough to become an actual usage problem".

Notably, Anbernic did not seem to respond to the LPDDR3 downgrade claim, and replacing 'LPDDR4' on the website specs certainly doesn't paint the best picture about what memory you can expect in your device. As has become the norm with the memory crisis, that means buying the handheld now gets you a worse one than you would have gotten just a year ago, for the same price.

512 ram RG34xxSP - Update - Samsung 740 K4E4E324EE EGCF - 512 LPDDR3 from r/ANBERNIC

The problem many have with this downgrade is that it doesn't appear to have been signposted by Anbernic itself, outside of a specs sheet most will glaze over. If it instead got a price increase, people would notice immediately, but simply changing the spec sheet won't be enough to inform many of what has actually changed.

The memory crisis has hit many gaming companies over the last year. Just a few months ago, Wallace Santos, the CEO of gaming PC builder Maingear, told me, "In the two plus decades I've been doing this, this is the first time where I'm seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, at least for the next two years. It's not a multi-week problem, it's a multi-year problem that we're facing right now."

We've seen price increases, in turn, from Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve on their respective gaming devices. And that's before mentioning the Steam Machine, which I'm not fully convinced we'll see soon, or at a reasonable price. Still, if you've got an Anbernic device, it might be worth cracking that bad boy open to see if all is in order.

Last week, Samsung narrowly swerved a planned South Korean factory strike with a last-minute deal. The workers' union had agreed to not go ahead with the strike planned to commence on May 21 as it put a fresh proposal to an internal vote.

That vote has since taken place, with 74% of union members voting in favour of a profit sharing deal that could result in workers taking home an average of $340,000 in bonuses (via Bloomberg). It just goes to show what can be achieved through collective bargaining power, especially in an industry so central to AI as memory manufacturing has become.

The agreement will see 78,000 semiconductor workers receive 10.5 per cent of Samsung’s operating profit. According to the Financial Times, projections suggest this bonus pool will amount to a total of $22.6 billion (or 34 trillion in South Korean Won). Considering Samsung is a member of the $1 trillion market capitalisation club, profit sharing with its workers is only fair.

40% of the bonus pool will be shared out equally, while what's left is to be awarded based on departmental performance. The Financial Times estimates memory chip workers will receive a bonus roughly equivalent to $400,400.

This profit sharing deal is similar to the one SK Hynix struck with its own workers last year, promising 10 % of operating profits for the next decade. As an interesting side note, the Chosun Daily reported that SK Hynix employees were elevated "to the same 'precious' status as traditional high-status professions like doctors and lawyers in the [South Korean] marriage market" as a result of this 'bonus bonanza'.

A number of Samsung workers also left the company for greener pastures at the rival company. There's still a risk workers will continue to leave, as the final deal for Samsung's employees is ever so slightly less generous in terms of per-person compensation.

Looking at the tech and games sphere more broadly, the role of unions only feels more urgent (even if few have a shot at such a generous profit share deal as Samsung or SK Hynix's employees). For one thing, the Rockstar situation hasn't been far from my mind since last year.

For another, more recent example, three years after laying off more than 1,000 employees, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have begun sending daily emails and physical letters encouraging the survivors not to unionise. These examples, plus many, many more I could mention, are why game dev union members marched at this year's GDC to propose a 'Game Workers' Bill of Rights.' A better world is possible—and not just for game and tech workers.

Corsair has just announced a new DDR5 memory design that has me wishing we were still living with 2024 prices. It's called Shugo, and is unfortunately only a limited edition, created "for builders who see the machine as both a performance PC and a personal design statement."

It's also, erm, $600 (£579) for a 32 GB DDR5-6000 kit, so... yeah, there's that. Fancy limited editions are always more expensive than regular ones, and there's the memory shortage to factor in, too, but $600 is another level. For reference, a lot of similarly specced DDR5 kits right now are going for about $400, which is already a massively inflated price point.

The designs, made "in collaboration with community artists", of course look very nice, as you can see from the image above. But a big part of what makes this limited line-up interesting is its use of micro-drilling.

Shugo DDR5, Corsair says, "introduces CORSAIR patent-pending light-emitting micro-drilling technology, which allows RGB lighting to shine through the side of the module and become part of the artwork itself. Each SHUGO design incorporates its own micro-hole pattern, creating lighting effects that emerge from the art rather than sitting apart from it."

"Each module features premium aluminum heat spreaders, high-resolution UV printing, and precision pad printing to create a layered, collector-grade appearance"

"Statement" indeed, though I'd argue any gaming PC these days is somewhat of a statement, given the way prices have gone and are still going. On that front, research analysts reckon we're still in store for significant price hikes going forward, to the tune of 50% extra for DRAM customers next quarter, which will, of course, filter down into actual RAM prices for consumers before long.

Oh, what could have been if only the market had remained in 2024 mode. Perhaps then I could get more excited about new RAM aesthetics like this, as perhaps they wouldn't cost an arm and both legs. I can still appreciate the product, though, I suppose. And heck, who knows, perhaps it'll even feature in some pre-builts that get price slashed in sales events down to near-reasonable levels. A man can dream.

You don't need me to tell you that the exponential rise of AI servers has made PC enthusiasts think twice about buying a new upgrade, because one look at the current prices of graphics cards, DRAM kits, and SSDs tells you everything you need to know about the RAMpocalypse. But while things might seem to have calmed down a bit, one of the world's biggest suppliers of memory and storage has warned that certain components are still going to rise in price.

Hermitage Akihabara recently interviewed the CEO of Team Group, Gerry Chen, and opened with a simple question as to what his outlook was for the immediate future. "Currently, AI-related demand is very high in the overall memory market, accounting for 40-50% of the total supply. We expect this demand to continue to increase, and the majority of memory produced between 2026 and 2027 already has its customers," he began.

"The supply shortage is not limited to DRAM. NAND flash memory is also experiencing a similar supply shortage, resulting in a tight supply-demand situation across the entire market. Therefore, we believe that the overall memory market is likely to continue experiencing supply shortages until 2028."

It's worth noting that Team Group doesn't manufacture DRAM and NAND flash; instead, it buys modules in bulk from SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung. It then takes those chips to make its own DDR5 memory kits and SSDs.

That means the company is first in line to suffer the effects of limited supply, and since the process of turning raw modules into finished products isn't 100% perfect, Team Group's output will be even more limited.

When the interview turned to the question of prices for PCs and their components, Chen didn't have any good news. "I believe prices will rise further. While server product prices have already increased significantly, the general PC market is still relatively low at the moment.

"However, demand for AI servers and general-purpose servers is very strong, and prices are actually rising at a rate of about 30% per quarter. This trend is likely to continue for some time. The current general PC market is facing a very challenging situation in terms of pricing, but if server market prices continue to rise, we believe there is a high probability that the prices of PC products as a whole will follow suit."

Let me just paraphrase what Team Group said: The price rises we have already seen for entire PCs, as well as the parts inside them, have been much lower than those for servers. But if that sector continues to get worse, more of the raw component supply will be switched to the server market, leaving even less for the general consumer.

If that comes to pass, then the parts that are in the highest demand will see much bigger price hikes, and that unfortunately means DDR5 and SSDs. So if the thought of paying over $160 for a 1 TB NVMe drive leaves you cold, you'll be freezing to death by this time next year.

Ordinarily, I'd scoff at any company suggesting you should buy its products right now because the price will go up soon, as it's clearly a self-serving suggestion. But in this instance, I have to say that unless you're willing to wait until well into 2028 for an upgrade, you'd better bite the bullet now before things get even worse.

You might be forgiven for thinking there's something very worrisome going on in the PC hardware industry, what with memory modules staying at their skyrocketed shortage-induced prices. But don't worry folks, because memory makers are doing very well indeed, with revenue shooting up to nearly $100 billion as of the last quarter, according to Counterpoint Research.

Part of that revenue has fed into new-high market caps (company value, adding up outstanding shares) for SK hynix and Micron, both of which have just hit $1 trillion, catching up with Samsung, which achieved the same earlier in the month (via Reuters).

It's worth noting that, according to Counterpoint's charts, despite Micron and SK's new highs, it's Samsung that has been chomping through market share. In Q4 2025, Samsung held 36% of the DRAM market, SK had 32%, and Micron had 22%. Now, Samsung has 38% and SK 29%, with Micron remaining at 22%.

CXMT—ChangXin Memory Technologies, a Chinese memory maker—is also worth looking at, as its market share has climbed from 3% at the start of 2025 up to 8% now.

The company's memory has reportedly been found in Corsair DDR5 modules for the Chinese market, so it seems that its increased market share is starting to move the company into the bona fide mainstream. Which isn't to say Chinese memory will be a much cheaper alternative for Western end-users like you and I, at least not if our Nick's market research is anything to go by.

Apparently, another "blockbuster" quarter is in store for memory makers with another 50% price increase expected. Good news for Samsung, SK, and Micron, but not so good for its customers, and certainly not very good for downstream customers such as PC gamers.

This being said, there's much that can change in markets given the very real human element. Samsung has just swerved a planned factory strike, but industrial action is still a looming threat not just for Samsung but for semiconductor makers in general, including TSMC.

And then, of course, there's the fact that political action and war can have a big impact on materials and supplies, as we're seeing with the war in Iran. Oh, and of course, there's the ever-looming threat of the AI bubble bursting.

Until then, though, it seems like height after height for the DRAM bigwigs.