RAM price rise hell is making me think the unthinkable – could the PS5 be a better buy than a Steam Machine?

• RAM price hikes are now worryingly hefty at retailers
• Some RAM kits are double or closer to triple the cost they were just a couple of months ago
• This could have a knock-on effect on the Steam Machine, but rumor has it Sony has played it smart by building up RAM supply for its console

There's a new barometer for memory pricing, and it's a disturbing one – namely, comparing the cost of a DDR5 RAM kit for a PC to the price of a PS5 to show how ridiculously expensive system memory has become.

Tom's Hardware noticed that over at Newegg in the US, there's a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64GB RAM kit (a pair of 32GB modules) on sale for $580 currently, with a discount and promo code bringing it down from $640, which is the full asking price.

That's almost as expensive as the PS5 Pro with its best discount at the time of writing in the US: the console is priced at $649 at Walmart.

Let's chew that one over for a moment: that 64GB RAM kit is only $69 (just a touch over 10%) less than a shiny new PS5 Pro console (which has 18GB of RAM, admittedly mostly video memory, but still, it's in there, alongside 2TB storage, in terms of all the memory inside Sony's device).

Granted, you can get cheaper DDR5 RAM than the highlighted G.Skill kit in the US, but not by all that much. The cheapest offering I can see (again, at the time of this being published) is a Crucial 64GB kit for $510. If we want to compare that to the base PS5 console, at $399 on sale currently, the system RAM is 28% pricier – nearly a third more.

How has it come to this in the world of RAM? It is, of course, those memory price hikes we've been hearing so much about for some time, and now we're witnessing the full force of those supply woes.

As Tom's points out, based on price tracking data, that G.Skill Trident Z5 64GB RAM kit, which is now at $640 for its full asking price, could be picked up for around $210 (at times) in the few months before October 2025, prior to this fresh memory price surge kicking in. It was $220 as recently as late in September, and now the price has come close to tripling.

If we examine the Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB kit (2 x 32GB modules), it's currently $537 on Amazon US, whereas if we look back at the six-month pricing history on CamelCamelCamel, it was $145 at times in July and August 2025 – and it's been around $150 to $160 from June through most of September.

Take a slightly more modest 32GB kit – which is now the baseline level of memory for a new gaming PC in terms of future-proofing – and the picture remains bleak. A Crucial Pro DDR5 32GB kit (2 x 16GB modules) is now $301 on Amazon US, three-quarters of the asking price of the base PS5. Wind the clock back to October 21, and that same kit was $175 according to CamelCamelCamel – a 70% price increase in the space of just over a month.

It's a similarly frightening picture elsewhere, such as in the UK, where a Crucial Pro DDR5 64GB kit (2 x 32GB) that's been £170 throughout the last six months just shot up to £299 after the first week of November. That's not quite as bad as the US, but it's still a pretty staggering rise.

Analysis: Steam Machine dream coming apart at the seams?

This RAM price hike is seriously bad news, then, and it's also very worrying for Valve's freshly revealed box-of-gaming-tricks for the living room. Why? Because the memory shortage is going to push up the price of system RAM and storage for the Steam Machine, which will potentially interfere with Valve's plan to keep the mini PC relatively affordable.

But it's when you see how bad this RAM crisis has got, you realize that it's starting to look like, well, just that – a crisis – and that it could have a nasty impact on the price of the Steam Machine. Yes, okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves and into the realm of speculation here, but I think it's a genuine concern.

There's an additional wrinkle here, too. Bear in mind that I've said before that the wider PC and console market is also going to be buffeted by these strong memory headwinds, and so in theory the Steam Machine should still stay at a relatively affordable level compared to other hardware.

However, what I didn't realize is that, according to fresh rumors – attach a weighty caveat now – Sony has been clever here and has stockpiled a load of RAM modules for the PS5. We're told that for the near-term and mid-term, Sony is good for RAM supply, and its consoles won't be affected by memory-related pricing difficulties as a result, but the Xbox might be. And, of course, Valve's Steam Machine will most likely be hit, too.

The upshot is that, never mind comparing PC RAM sticks to the price of the PS5, when we come to draw a comparison between the base PS5 and the finalized Steam Machine next year – with memory and storage price hikes affecting the latter, but not the former – Sony might blow Valve out of the water in the value stakes.

True, Valve is trying to do something different with the value proposition of the Steam Machine, as an engineer highlighted when talking about how the firm won't subsidize the mini PC (as is the case with consoles). And I get that, I understand where Valve's coming from with an interesting approach to some aspects of living room gaming, but it's not going to stand up to a potential gulf in the pricing of these rival devices.

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