What a Custom PC Actually Costs Right Now — and Whether You Should Wait

If you priced out a PC last year, saved the list, and came back to it this month, you got a shock. You didn't misremember. The parts genuinely cost more now, and in a couple of categories the increase is dramatic.

We build and ship custom PCs from Dawsonville, Georgia to customers all over the country, so we watch these prices closely and track where the numbers move. Here's the honest version of what's happening, without the "buy now before it's too late" pressure you'll get from most places — including, we'd note, the places that profit from you panicking.

Memory is the big one

DRAM prices climbed roughly 170% over the course of 2025, and they haven't come back down. Some individual kits have gone up far more than that.

To put real numbers on it: a 16GB DDR5 kit is running around $209 right now, and that's about the floor. The more painful example is high-capacity memory — a 64GB DDR5 kit that cost a little over $200 in October 2025 climbed to $800–$900 by the end of that year. That is the same part, quadrupled.

The cause isn't gamers. It's AI datacenters buying memory in volumes that dwarf the consumer market, and manufacturers happily reallocating production to the customer paying more. Gartner has projected the crunch stretching into 2027, so this isn't a blip that resolves next quarter.

Graphics cards went up three separate times

NVIDIA raised prices to its board partners three times this year: roughly 10–15% in January, a narrower increase aimed at the RTX 5090 in May, and another 20–30% adjustment in August. On top of that, they've raised the price of the GDDR7 and GDDR6 memory that goes on the cards themselves — a single 3GB GDDR7 module reportedly runs $60–70 now.

Those increases go to the companies that build the cards, and they land on the shelf price a few weeks later. Analysts expect finished graphics cards to end up 20–30% more expensive as this works through.

Storage is tightening too — NAND flash supply is under the same pressure. So a PC build right now is absorbing three cost increases at once: GPU, memory, and SSD.

This isn't only a custom-build problem

Worth saying clearly, because it changes the decision: Lenovo, Dell, HP, Acer, and ASUS have all warned their customers of 15–20% price increases on systems shipping in the second half of 2026. Prebuilt machines are not a way to dodge this. The parts inside them cost the same as the parts inside ours.

If anything, the big brands respond to cost pressure by quietly changing what's in the box — less memory, a slower drive, a weaker power supply — while keeping the model name and the price familiar. The price looks stable and the machine gets worse. That's the part we'd want you to watch for.

So should you wait?

Here's our actual read, and it's not the same answer for everyone.

Don't wait if your current machine is holding you back today

Nothing in the supply picture suggests meaningful relief in the next six months. Waiting for a price drop that analysts are projecting into 2027 means spending that whole time on a computer that frustrates you, and quite possibly paying more at the end of it. If the PC is for work, the math is even more lopsided — a few months of lost productivity outruns the savings easily.

Do wait if you're upgrading something that's still fine

If you're running a machine that handles what you actually do, and the upgrade is about wanting more rather than needing more, this is a genuinely bad month to spend money. There's no shame in getting another year out of a good PC.

Consider upgrading instead of replacing

This is the option people skip. If your PC is three or four years old, a fresh SSD, a proper cleaning and repaste, and a graphics card that matches what you play can cost a fraction of a new build and get you most of the way there. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a whole machine you didn't need. If you're local, call us and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth upgrading or whether you're throwing good money after bad.

Where the money should go in a build right now

When parts are expensive, where you spend matters more than usual.

• Don't overbuy memory. This is the flipped rule of 2026. 32GB is plenty for gaming and most work. Going to 64GB "to be safe" used to cost a little; today it can cost hundreds. Buy what you need and add later if the market softens.
• Don't cheap out on the power supply. It's the one part that can take everything else with it when it fails, and with components this expensive, that's a much worse day than it used to be.
• The graphics card should match your monitor. A card built for 4K is wasted money on a 1080p screen. This is the single most common place we see people overspend.
• One good SSD beats two mediocre ones. With NAND tightening, buy the capacity you'll actually use.
• Cases and cooling haven't spiked. If you want to spend a little on something that makes the machine nicer to live with, that's where it goes furthest right now.

What we're doing about it

We're not going to pretend we've escaped this — nobody buying parts has. What we can do is be straight with you about it. When you ask us for a build, you get the current real price and an explanation of what's driving it, and if we think you should wait or upgrade instead of buying, we'll say so.

We build and ship nationwide from Dawsonville, and every machine is assembled, cable-managed and stress-tested before it goes out. You can browse our builds, configure one part by part, or just tell us your budget and what you play and we'll put together something honest.

Questions about a build? Call or text (706) 203-2563. Happy to talk you out of spending money you don't need to spend.