As far as the memory shortage is concerned, we’re yet to see much light at the end of the tunnel. Case in point, there’s mutterings about yet another hardware price spike, and this time it may mean the already pretty expensive Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU could go up in price by as much as $300.
To be clear, no consumer-facing increase has yet been announced. However, a source on Board Channels reports that add-in-card (AIC) partners in China have been warned of a 2,000 RMB (or $300) price increase. If true, this increase will likely trickle down into a sharp uptick that PC gamers will feel as well. Reportedly, the price increase affects both the RTX 5090 and its China-exclusive RTX 5090D V2 variant, which enjoys 24GB of GDDR7 memory (via VideoCardz).
For comparison’s sake, the model of the RTX 5090 available to those with the cash in the UK and US enjoys 32 GB GDDR7. With that much memory, rumours of a price increase are far from surprising, especially as the PS5 has already seen a significant price increase for similar reasons. The price of the Nintendo Switch 2 will also increase later this year. The Steam Machine is still hoping to launch this year, too, but who knows at what price amid the memory supply crisis. At the very least, there’s no word yet on similar price increases for Nvidia’s other 50-series cards.
Current pricing for the RTX 5090 isn’t really in the ballpark of affordable to begin with. If you’ve been keeping up with Nick’s graphics card price watch, you’ll note that a reasonably priced RTX 5090 hasn’t featured in some time. You may also have seen Best Buy asking for an eye-watering $5090 for the high-end GPU. That’s a particularly egregious example, though the MSRP $1,999 card has been venturing closer to the $3,500 mark since the start of the year.
Still, if you’ve been looking to upgrade your rig recently, then you don’t need me to tell you how much the memory supply crisis has impacted component pricing—though, those still a little unclear on the situation should give our Jacob’s RAMpocalypse explainer a read.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
The short version is that the AI industry is hungry for memory chips, causing an outsized demand that leaves the capacity of even major memory manufacturers like SK hynix at ‘essentially zero right now‘. Like many other major players, SK hynix has various capacity-expanding projects in the works, though these likely won’t have a meaningful impact on supply until 2028 at the earliest.
Limited supply means higher prices, with HP recently warning that memory now makes up around 35% of the cost of its PCs. Worse still, the limited supply situation has also given rise to pretty convincing counterfeit DDR5 modules as well. Alas, running a gaming PC without RAM or a GPU isn’t really an option—unless playing Snake in the BIOS is your idea of a good time.
