If you already have a decent gaming PC, you're pretty happy with all of this – as long as the games you want to play don't have Mario or Pikachu, your PC is all you really need. It's also not a completely terrible time to upgrade an existing build if you already have at least 16GB of RAM – if you're thinking about upgrading your GPU, doing it now before RAM price hikes start affecting graphics card prices is probably a smart move.
If you Not You already have a decent gaming PC, and you can buy an entire PlayStation 5 for the cost of several 32GB DDR5 RAM kits. Well, it's hard to ignore the downsides, no matter how good the benefits are. But that doesn't mean we can't try.
What if you still want to buy something?
Even though they're (relatively) old, mid-range Core i5 chips from Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th generation Core processor lines are still a solid choice for budget and midrange PC builds. And they work with DDR4, which is not the case. enough now as expensive as DDR5.
Credit: Andrew Cunningham
Say these positives are still attracts you and you want to build something today. How should you approach this terrible and volatile RAM market?
I won't do a full update. System Guide for August right now, because it seems futile to try to recommend individual RAM kits or SSDs, prices and stock levels are as volatile as they are, and also because, RAM and storage aside, I wouldn't really change any of these recommendations much (with the caveat that the Intel Core i5-13400F seems to be getting harder to find; consider the i5-12400F or i5-12600KF). So, starting with these builds, here's the advice I'd like to give to friends interested in PC:
DDR4 is doing better than DDR5.. Prices for all types of RAM have increased recently, but prices for DDR4 have not changed. enough just as bad as DDR5 prices. This won't help you if you're trying to build something around a new Ryzen chip and an AM5 socket motherboard, since those components require DDR5. But if you're trying to build a lower-end system based on one of Intel's 12th, 13th, or 14th generation processors, Decent brand kit 32 GB DDR4-3200 costs about half as much similar kit DDR5-6000 32 GB. Prices are not bigbut it's still possible to build something decent for under $1000.
