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RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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My base starting point parts list (full build with 9800x3d, 64GB/4TB, 9700xt) was 2000usd about five months ago when it was last used to base a build on.
It's currently 'down' to about 3400 after peaking last week at over 3500. The excess is nearly entirely from RAM and SSD prices.
You include double of the ram you realistically need. Why?
The absolute narcissism in this take is mind-boggling. “I don’t do anything that needs more than 32 GB of RAM, therefore you don’t either”
Double the ram that YOU realistically need but maybe not of the RAM that they need.. perhaps they do more than just gaming?
What could they possibly do that needs that much RAM that does not provide an income.
64 GB is more than just a bit of extra memory. 32 is enough even if you are running docker containers.
Just buying RAM for the sake of it and then complaining about lack of affordability is not a helpful thing. Yes RAM was cheap so people did that. But you can just not do that and be mostly fine.
Even if it provides an income that doesn't necessarily mean they've got an employer financing it or that they're super well-off. Freelancers and contractors exist after all.
For me, an upgrade from 32 GB to 64 or more would benefit my work, but not to a degree that I want to pay current RAM prices for it. I'm not suddenly going to get 10 hours of work done in 8 just because the RAM intensive parts of my workflow take 10x less time because it's no longer all happening in swap. It'd be more like 10 hours of work done in 9.5. Adds up over time, but also a pretty small difference to even account for.
A CPU upgrade would currently be more important for me though, that might literally save me an hour or two per day depending on what I'm doing and how much shit needs to get done. 5950x starting to look mighty attractive compared to my 3500x.
Saving 2 hours a week is about the price of ram in a month or two.
64gb of ram is very useful for 3d modeling and other hobby arts.
Used to be cheap AF too. Shame
I have 64 GB in my CAD machine, unfortunately or fortunately it doesn't really make use of it like systems used to 15 years ago. Many CAD tools write portions to nvme temp drive folders now and don't fill RAM, that way the companies can claim a lower hardware spec (at least thats my theory on why they no longer max it out)
My primary gaming machine is also my primary work machine because my job gave me a budget and told me to build whatever I needed.
I genuinely find myself sometimes pushing 45-50GB of usage but then I also run local LLM workloads (sometimes glm-4.7-flash for agent use, and our apps use LLMs for things like smart paste and title/tag generation).
Fair point. But for data security etc. Most people must use different devices + that's a for profit, not for leisure operation. I was just saying that you don't need it in a personal computer you are not using for work.
You are right, people overbuild. And if they log ovwrall system load its probably so low on a home server.
I personally use like 40gb of ram opening up city skylines and rimworld before I started compressing textures. VMs, video editing, 3d modeling are all ram demons and are all hobbies people have.
There are plenty of workloads that need 64 to 128 gb of ram.
Yeah. But not in a personal rig. Professional compute + shit like that is suffering much more. Which is what I was saying.
If you dont do that stuff as a job and do it as a hobby theres no reason not to have it in your personal rig. Ram was dirt cheap and if you've got a top tier CPU you may as well go hard.
Back in my day when RAM was cheap, 8GB is worthless, 16GB is minimum spec to do anything remotely productive, 32GB covers 98% of scenarios, and 64GB is ehh why not at least this way I never have to worry about it.
Taps my SAMBA and MiniDlna server on the top, this baby doin' fine at 256MB. Seriously, it doesn't even use the full amount of RAM.
That's a very liberal stretch of that meme format, I love it
Why are you doing anything productive on your home PC?
You certainly got a right to, but in my experience 16 gb are enough while 32 are plenty. If I am at work I want more.
Productive hobbies, multitasking while gaming, ... Optimizing my media collection... Astrophotography.
Future proofing and/or "retiring" the computer to home server duty when its time to build again (thats what im telling myself at any rate)
Edit: plus i have heard that DDR5 has issues with more than 2 sticks of RAM. Not sure the specifics though
Then buy extra when the shortage has subsided. While you are too small to harm anyone you are not doing anyone any favors.
Not OP but 64gb of ram will let them run some good sized AI models locally along with their video card. Definitely enough to play around with things now and in the future.
That's not a typical home use work load for gamers.
We're not discussing 'typical' workloads (whatever that is), we're discussing one specific person's use case, and you've somehow decided you know better than him without any information
And because he posted in a gaming community he can't have any other use for it?
I game, I dabble in local AIs.
He could do all sorts of stuff that might need it.