Yes, but change what you spend the money on. The 2026 memory shortage pushed RAM and NVMe SSD prices up hard, while CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies stayed close to where they were. IDC now expects average PC prices to rise by up to 8% in 2026 on the back of that shortage, with some vendors already shipping prebuilts without RAM installed. So the smart build today buys the stable parts now and takes only the memory and storage capacity you'll actually use — not the "future-proof" amount.
Waiting for a broad price drop is the losing move. NAND and DRAM contract prices are still climbing, just more slowly, and memory makers have signaled no real capacity relief until late 2027. There is no cheap window coming to wait for.
What got more expensive — and what didn't
The 2026 increase isn't across the board. It traces to one cause: memory makers redirected wafers toward high-bandwidth memory and server DRAM for AI datacenters, and NAND toward enterprise SSDs. That starves the consumer PC market of exactly two components — system memory and solid-state storage — and leaves the rest of the parts list largely alone.
| Component | 2026 price direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| RAM (DDR5 and DDR4) | Up sharply | DRAM capacity shifted to HBM and server memory |
| NVMe SSDs (NAND) | Up sharply | NAND redirected to enterprise SSDs |
| GPUs | Already high | Own supply constraints, plus GDDR pressure |
| CPUs | Roughly flat | Not memory parts |
| Motherboards | Roughly flat | Not memory parts |
| PSU / case / cooler | Roughly flat | Not memory parts |
You can see it in our own catalog. The Samsung 990 PRO 1TB sits at $367.98 — a number that would have looked absurd for a 1TB Gen4 drive a year ago. Even old DDR4 got dragged up: a 16GB DDR4-3200 kit now runs about $264, the same pattern we traced in how much RAM to buy right now. Meanwhile the Ryzen 7 7700X at $281.43 and a mainstream B850 board around $207 are priced like a normal year. The processor and the platform aren't what's broken.
What it means if you're building now
Buy the compute, ration the memory. A CPU, motherboard, GPU, PSU, and case bought today cost about what they should, and they don't get cheaper by waiting. Lock those in.
Then be disciplined about the two expensive parts:
- RAM: get 32GB, not 64GB. For gaming and general use, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 is still the target and 16GB is the floor — see 16GB vs 32GB for gaming. At today's prices, a 64GB kit at $725.07 is a large premium for capacity most builds never touch.
- Storage: one right-sized SSD. A single 1–2TB NVMe covers Windows and a real game library. Our guide on how much SSD storage you need walks through sizing. NVMe slots are easy to add to later, so there's no reason to overbuy storage in the most expensive quarter for NAND in years.
- Reuse what you have. A working SSD or DDR5 kit from an old build is worth more than usual right now. Carry it over and spend the savings on the GPU.
The honest negative: this is a bad quarter to "future-proof" memory or storage. Overbuying capacity at a 70%-plus contract-price increase is spending real money to sit idle. And if your only reason to build was cheap high-capacity RAM and storage, waiting won't rescue you — TrendForce sees the shortage easing slowly at best, not resolving. If you want to sanity-check part totals before you buy, build the list in our PC Builder and add the RAM and SSD last.
