3 ways you can get around the RAM crisis to upgrade your PC

Now is a terrible time to be building a PC, or at least upgrading its RAM. Prices for DDR5 RAM have more than doubled since November 2025, to the point that for the cost of 64GB, you could buy a PlayStation 5 Pro. Let’s all blame generative AI for this one — the massive expansion of datacenters has swallowed up supply. Micron is even winding down its Crucial consumer brand to focus exclusively on datacenter customers. For those of us who’ve been building PCs for a long time, seeing the Crucial name disappear is akin to finding out that your local grocery store is no longer carrying Pepsi or Dr. Pepper.

So if you want to build or upgrade a PC, what can you do to avoid paying through the nose for memory? There are a variety of options, although in some cases you might actually end up paying more to see a meaningful speed boost. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you might be better off buying DDR5 RAM after all. Depending on your circumstances, the smartest thing to do may be postponing a purchase until things have settled down.

Choosing slower DDR4 RAM

A roll of the dice

I’ll be blunt here: you probably shouldn’t go this route. Unless you’re already using an older motherboard, most new PC builds are going to be designed with DDR5 in mind, since DDR4 is last-generation technology. It’s about half as fast as DDR5 — which only translates into a minor performance drop in most apps, but that doesn’t bode well for futureproofing. Also, the prices of DDR4 modules have jumped alongside others, so you may end up spending nearly as much on them as you would on superior components.

If the stars align, though, DDR4 might be a viable route, particularly if you’re not planning to use your PC for demanding tasks like 3D gaming. You won’t put your memory to the test running Chrome or Excel. In fact, with some apps, it’s far more important to have a copious amount of RAM than anything fast — as I write this, Chrome alone is consuming over 8GB on my laptop, despite my not opening nearly as many tabs as some people. I chose a laptop with 32GB precisely because I wanted the flexibility to have multiple apps in the background while I play games.

If all this sounds interesting, you’ve got a few items on your agenda. The first is verifying that your motherboard is compatible with DDR4 memory. Next, you’ll want to check what spec of DDR4 your board supports, and whether that’s genuinely faster than what you have now, unless you’re only planning to increase quantity instead of quality. Lastly, you’ll want to do price comparisons versus similarly-sized DDR5 modules. If the gap is small, it may be better to pony up, hold out a little longer, or choose from one of the options below.

Spending more on your graphics card

The biggest booster for 3D

Credit: Nvidia

If your main interest in building or upgrading a PC is gaming, or other functions involving a lot of 3D rendering, the GPU (graphics processor) should be your focal point. Yes, the RAM and CPU in your machine still matter a great deal — but modern graphics can be so demanding that a dedicated card is effectively its own computer. If you’re still relying on the graphics tech integrated into your CPU, simply adding any dedicated card will probably offer a massive performance boost in games.

The GPU market is in a precarious position of its own, however. The best cards are made by Nvidia, but so many of those are being bought for AI processing or cryptocurrency mining that they can be enormously expensive. An RTX 5080 will set you back at least $1,000, and the top-end 5090 starts at $2,000, as much as some entire gaming rigs. It’s just not worth it to go all-out on a 50-series card unless you’re rich or genuinely need the performance for your job.

The best value with 50-series cards at the moment is probably the RTX 5070 Ti, with prices ranging between $750 and $900. That’s still not cheap, but you’ll get 16GB of VRAM, enough for 4K gaming. And as long as you don’t demand the highest possible framerates at maximum detail, you’ll be good to go for the next three, four, or maybe even five years.

If you can’t afford a 5070 Ti, you may be able to find an RTX 4070 or 4070 Ti at a reasonable price. They’re still very powerful cards, and models with 8 to 14GB of VRAM can comfortably run games at 1440p resolution. Beware though — some vendors are actually charging way more for a 16GB 4070 Ti than you’d pay for a 5070 Ti.

Another alternative is buying one of AMD’s best Radeon GPUs. At the moment, I’d choose the Radeon 9070 XT, which can be found for less than $700 on sale. Just about any current game should play smooth as butter.

Upgrading to a faster SSD

Not the same, but still a speed boost

I’ve consciously avoided mentioning CPUs much in this article, since it’s often impractical to upgrade them. A next-generation CPU typically requires a new motherboard as well, at which point you’ve gutted the heart of your computer, and may need to buy other components to match. It can be more cost-effective to buy an entirely new PC.

My final suggestion, then, is upgrading your permanent storage. You’ll see the biggest leap if you’re migrating to an M.2 NVMe SSD from a platter-based hard drive (HDD) or a SATA-based SSD. Whereas a SATA SSD like the Samsung 870 Evo reads at 570MBps, the M.2-based Samsung 990 Pro operates at a blistering 7,450MBps — and it’s not even the fastest stick out there. You’ll see a substantial improvement in load times, no matter if you’re using 16GB of DDR4 RAM.

Things are a little trickier if you’ve already got an M.2 SSD. You’ll need to check what versions of PCIe your motherboard supports, and shop around to see if any compatible SSDs are substantially faster. One of the fastest products on the market is the WD Black SN8100, but you won’t get its 14,000MBps-plus read and write times without a PCie 5.0 x4 slot.

Remember that ultimately, faster storage can only do so much if other parts of your system are a bottleneck. For an analogy, imagine rushing a package to another city — it hardly matters if you used a Porsche to drop it off at the courier if they’re delivering it on a Ford Model T. If you’ve already got an M.2 with enough space, it’s probably wiser to save up for a faster graphics card, or more RAM if you’re stuck with 8GB.