Who's buying RAM in 2026? There's no CPU or GPU upgrades this year, DDR5 was introduced 5 years ago, and there was little reason to wait when shit was already cheap last year.
It's not like a new product has come out that you can't get because it's unavailable - this is shit that everyone who's into PC gaming should have either bought or resolved to skip sometime in the past decade.
I've got tons of DDR4 and old Intel systems, and I'm going to give away an AM4 system. I grabbed a cheap i3-1315U laptop with an empty slot and upgraded that to 16 GB with DDR4 SODIMM that had been sitting around for years. My primary system has 64 GB of DDR4.
The DDR5 crysis will probably be resolved by 2027-2028. Zen 6 and allegedly Zen 7 will launch on AM5, making that platform unavoidable for the next few years. You could wait and jump in on cheap bundles that become available, as they always eventually do. Standard/X3D chips should get two consecutive increases of cores and L3 cache, so even budget 9600X successors will be stupendously fast. On the Intel side, I would ignore Arrow Lake unless a cute prebuilt gets clearanced at Walmart. Nova Lake-S looks very interesting with
AVX-512 (AVX10), APX, up to double the cores plus LPE cores, what I assume is an improved iGPU (up to 2 Xe3-LPG cores, instead of 4 Xe1-LPG), a vastly improved
74 TOPS NPU, and possible bLLC SKUs as an X3D competitor. It probably adds
VVC hardware decode, which may be relevant to somebody's HTPC eventually.
Maybe we'll see a reintroduction of the 5700X3D and/or RTX 3060 12 GB for 2026 poverty builds. I wouldn't count on it, but it's not impossible:
New Ryzen CPUs for AM4 may be back on the menu as AMD considers reintroducing select SKUs
Rumor: Nvidia Is Bringing RTX 3060 Back From the Dead Amid Memory Shortage
CEO Jensen Huang says Nvidia could potentially resurrect old GPUs to address shortages and high pricing — adding performance-boosting advanced AI features to older architectures is also on the table
In 2027-2028, I'll keep my eyes out for a good low profile 75W card I can stick in any of my old office systems. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia aren't really addressing the segment, with the exception of the Arc Pro B50, and an OEM-only RX 7400. I might look into getting more cheap crap that I don't need, like a Wildcat Lake box. If I build/buy a serious system from 2028-2032, I'm looking for it to be small form factor, relatively low power, have more RAM than I have now, and probably suitable for local AI. So either any small parts (possibly an MODT board) thrown into an Mini-ITX case with 128-192 GB of what we would hope would be dirt cheap DDR5 by then. Or one of the quad-channel soldered AI boxes.
If you really wanted to build with DDR5 in 2026, you could get 16 GB with the intention of upgrading it later. It's
around 200-230 USD for 2x8GB. Or shell out the money for 32 GB, which does get a little cheaper in some
bundles. Or wait it out and hope for prices to come down.