Just as CES 2026 ramps up, we may have arrived at the nadir of the RAM pricing crisis. Two bundles, posted and sold by Newegg itself, offer two G.Skill Trident 128GB DDR5 RAM kits at a staggering price of $1459 (or $1469, if you like RGB), with a measly $50 Starbucks gift card. The Newegg product listings read: "Free Starbucks Gift Card with purchase, Drink Coffee while you game!!", a truly historic low point in the history of PC building. No doubt, you'll likely be using that very same gift card on your way to work, to earn back the dollars spent on this exorbitantly expensive memory.
DRAM pricing has been spiralling since October, and companies may be looking for ways to sweeten the deal, as prices ramp up. Elsewhere in the industry, PC companies have been looking for creative ways to get around things. For example, Gigabyte is launching DDR4-based AM4 motherboards in 2026, almost a decade after the socket officially launched.
The G.Skill kit itself costs more than a brand-new RTX 5080 GPU, which is usually the most expensive part of a high-end PC build. But in an era where AI companies are willing to spend big on DRAM ICs, it's consumers who end up paying the price. If the Newegg offer doesn't entice you, that's not entirely surprising.
An IDC report suggests that due to rising memory costs, the PC market could shrink by 9%, under the most pessimistic scenarios. However, it doesn't take a genius to realize that paying such high prices for a bundle with "free" coffee isn't going to win over many customers. PCPartPicker's memory pricing tool also suggests that the average selling price for a 64GB DDR5-6000 RAM kit has skyrocketed to over $800, almost four times higher than September 2025 levels. But that's not to say you can't find any deals entirely, as they still exist, just be prepared to pay over the odds, compared to the prices seen earlier this year.
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