For those looking to purchase a new PC or upgrade their current one, particularly with RAM, the price surge has been dramatic, with costs doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling compared to just a year ago. This price increase began around late October and early November 2025 and happened so rapidly that many were caught off guard. Furthermore, this isn’t a temporary price hike; the situation is expected to persist for a considerable time. In fact, most PC gamers have lost hope and do not plan to buy a new PC within the next two years.
Imagine a new game releasing and your PC struggling to run it, leading to freezes, crashes, or poor performance that diminishes the gaming experience. This could happen with new releases like Crimson Desert, Pragmata, or Forza Horizon 6, which is launching tomorrow, though those with the Premium edition could play a few days prior. Beyond these, many other games have higher system requirements. Naturally, if your PC can’t handle them and you want to play them, or worse, you’ve already purchased them, you might have considered buying a new one or upgrading components, until you saw the prices.
It’s no surprise that PC sales have declined in recent months, with significant price increases not only in RAM but also affecting SSDs due to NAND Flash memory and even GPUs due to VRAM. Analysts anticipate PC shipment declines of 10% or more in 2026, and AMD expects its gaming CPU and GPU sales to drop by 20%. This is clearly reflected in a Tom’s Hardware survey where 60% of the surveyed gamers (936 votes) indicated they do not plan to replace their PC for more than 2 years.
This leaves 15% (237 votes) who plan to change their PC within 2 years and 10% of the votes representing those who want a new PC next year. The remaining portion is divided with 6% planning to change their PC next month, 5% in the next 6 months, and 4% in the next 3 months.
It’s curious that a larger percentage of gamers intend to change their PC in just one month compared to those who will wait much longer. While there aren’t any significant hardware releases expected next month, the COMPUTEX 2026 trade show is one of the world’s most important technology events. This event will showcase all new hardware and various PC components and other devices, so it’s worth keeping an eye on what will be presented.
Furthermore, this survey focused on a group of approximately 1,500 PC users and gamers from Tom’s Hardware, so they do not represent the general average. As that is a tech website, its users tend to have more knowledge than the average person. Therefore, if upgrading or buying a PC isn’t essential, it’s advisable to postpone it and wait for prices to decrease. However, it’s estimated that we won’t see more normalized prices until late 2027 or 2028.
