If you already own a decent gaming PC, you’re feeling pretty good about all of this: as long as the games you want to play don’t feature Mario or Pikachu, your PC is all you really need. It’s also not a completely horrible time to upgrade from a version you already own, provided you already have at least 16GB of RAM. If you’re considering a GPU upgrade, doing so now before RAM price hikes can start to impact graphics card prices is probably a smart move.
If you don’t do it If you already have a decent gaming PC and can buy an entire PlayStation 5 for the price of some 32GB DDR5 RAM kits, well, it’s hard to look past the cons, no matter how good the pros are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.
What if you still wanted to buy something?
As (relatively) old as they are, the mid-range Core i5 chips in Intel’s 12th, 13th, and 14th generation Core processor lines remain solid choices for budget to midrange PC builds. And they work with DDR4, which is not the case enough as expensive as DDR5 right now.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Say these benefits are still appeals to you and you want to build something today. How to approach this terrible and volatile RAM market?
I won’t do a full update of the August system guide at this time, both because it seems futile to try to recommend individual RAM kits or SSDs with prices and stock levels as volatile as they are, and because other than RAM and storage, I wouldn’t change these recommendations much (with the caveat that Intel’s Core i5-13400F seems increasingly difficult to find; instead, consider a i5-12400F or an i5-12600KF). So from these builds, here are the tips I would try to give to PC curious friends:
DDR4 performs better than DDR5. Prices of all types of RAM have increased recently, but DDR4 prices have not increased. enough as bad as the price of DDR5. This doesn’t help you if you’re trying to build something around a newer Ryzen chip and an AM5 socket motherboard, as those parts require DDR5. But if you’re trying to build a more budget-oriented system around one of Intel’s 12th, 13th, or 14th generation processors, a decently branded 32GB DDR4-3200 kit is about half the price of a similar 32GB DDR5-6000 kit. The price is not greatbut it’s still possible to build something respectable for less than $1,000.
