Modern tech has always been expensive. The new iPhone costs £799 for the base model and the new Samsung costs £1199. They’re both expensive phones and a far-cry from the price to quality models of older devices; but on the other side of the tech industry PC part reign supreme for having the most individual differences between parts. Minor tweaks are added to each iteration of GPU, CPU, and RAM that new prices and new manufacturing costs need to keep up with the demand for the product and these ever-accelerating times don’t help with the actions of fair pricing for the consumer.

RAM has always been the foundation of a PC, storing quick retrieval data for browsing the web or playing your favourite game at 144HZ. These pieces of tech have been every changing, ever evolving and have gone through many iterations to get to where we are today. It started as DDR (double data rate) and has travelled to where we are today at DDR4, the highest point of ability form RAM on the market. Currently the price of this RAM is around £5 for a single gigabyte, which sound like a good deal until you realise that a modern, well outfitted system now will require 16GB to run smooth in games and to be comfortably fast editing documents, recordings or any other tasks requiring multitasking data. RAM did not used to cost this much, and it seems prices are only going up.

DDR5 is on the horizon and, with it a price drop for all RAM from previous iterations. Hopefully, this allows many young PC enthusiasts with little money to spend have an opportunity to buy and build a PC from the cheaper parts going on the market soon. It is such a useful experience to be able to build a PC and learn how the machine you use everyday works and knowing that you gave life to it.