- DDR4 RAM becomes more expensive
- AI partly drives the increase in pricing but it is also a natural process
- Price increases are likely to continue
The PC Components Market has taken some of a twist, as slower last GEN DDR4 memory is now a good deal of more expensive than groundbreaking DDR5 RAM or at least it’s pretty much true and you can blame AI for this on a roundabout.
Toms Hardware picked up a Payment Walled Digitime Report that breaks down the pricing in the supply chain for PC RAM sticks. Just remember that this is a picture for the entire RAM market (business and consumer) and I will come back to why it is important shortly.
Digitimes observes that memory prices (for manufacturers of RAM) rose for 2nd quarter of 2025 and have now stabilized at these high levels, but the DDR4 is still crawling up. From August we were told that the price of 16 GB of DDR4 memory increased by 7% to $ 9.17 per year. Chip while DDR5 went the other way and fell 3% to $ 5.99 for each chip.
In short, DDR4 sets are now 50% more expensive than DDR5 (for the total memory market). So why does this happen? As mentioned in the beginning, the problem is that AI is all that is furious, and therefore the major memory producers – Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron – to produce more DDR5 and HBM (high bandwidth memory) to AI accelerators as they are big profit spinners.
The need for this production is to eat away at the capacity of assembly line for DDR4, and therefore there is less in the way of the modules produced that adversely affect the supply and therefore exerts an upward pressure on pricing.
Also, don’t expect this to change in Q4, which according to the Digitime Report, the DDR4 prices will probably go a little higher in the last quarter of this year.
Analysis: Out with the old, inevitable …
It is worth noting that Old Tech has, of course, decided over time, of course, of course, as it becomes more and more irrelevant, and this is the case with the DDR4 now, just as it was with older RAM standards before that. As everyone gets new PCs with DDR5 -Support – and the price of the modern memory standard comes down – and PC barley men stop using DDR4, it leads to the door. It’s just that the AI market in this case seems to speed up this departure.
Right now, although the prices of some DDR4 sets are clearly spiked, it is not the case that all price tags are going through the roof for the DDR4. In fact, when you look at 32 GB RAM set (a pair of 16 GB modules, which is the best way to configure this memory load), there is not much in it for the pricing of DDR5 and DDR4 sets in low-end, and the latter still has the slightly cheaper options. (Based on the current state of games at Newegg in the United States, but there is probably variation with different retailers and in other regions.)
So that doesn’t mean all The DDR4 RAM is now much more expensive, but this is largely true across the entire market (including the business world, not just consumer dealer sites when I touched earlier). There are still exceptions to this rule and you can see that it clearly looks at online pricing (for typical large consumer -facing retailers).
Still, with trends that are on the way as they are – and the DDR4 inevitably on the way out – if you want an affordable DDR4 RAM upgrade for an existing PC, it’s probably a good idea to buy now instead of waiting and grabs one of the lower prices still kicking around. We have also chosen the best DDR5 RAM for those in search of it, including budget -friendly options, as the current Obstard will be cheaper and cheaper.
