I bought a prebuilt mid-2025: 32GB DDR5-6000, 2TB SSD, 9800X3D, 5070 Ti for $1900. This happened to be good timing but you can still get these specs for a similar price occasionally eg [1] was $1899 last week. Luckily for me I bought a DDR5-6000 64GB kit for $200 for no real reason. And yeah that same kit is almost $1000 today. Plus I still have the old 32GB kit.

If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.

Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.

But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.

[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...

[2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...