Write a letter to Santa and pray to the gods.
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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avoid buying RAM until prices are sane
Prebuilts or buying used RAM
You can have less RAM than you might like, but you're going to have to have some. Some options:
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Hit https://shopping.google.com/ where I've still seen a few small retailers floating around that say that they have some memory in stock at original prices. If you can get it there, great, problem solved. Search for "ddr5 2x16gb" or whatever you need, and then sort by price, low to high.
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Bite the bullet and just buy as little memory as you can tolerate. If you can get by on 2x8GB, say, that might be a hit that you're willing to take. If you have four DIMM slots on your motherboard, you can get more later to fill the second pair of slots.
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Buy prebuilt, at least to begin with. Some OEMs still have stock of DIMMs for prebuilt machines and prices that have not increased to reflect higher memory prices yet (Dell, for example, won't be increasing for another week or so, and Lenovo will increase January 1).
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Scavenge. You might be able to get ahold of used memory. I don't know how viable it is to buy non-working PCs on eBay or the like, but it might be a gamble to get a source of DDR4 especially, if you're willing to do DDR4. Wouldn't be my first choice, but it's maybe an option.
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NVMe is pretty fast. Use NVMe swap, maybe a dedicated stick to avoid wear and tear on your main NVMe drive.
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Linux can do compressed swap to RAM (and disk)
zswap and zram. Windows probably has something similar. searches. Looks like it. Can run more software with less memory by trading off a bit of CPU time.
In that case, I believe your options are as follows:
- Don’t.
Buy a used PC instead
I hate to say it, but prebuilts are the absolute best bang for your buck that you can get now. At least for another month or two until the shortages start impacting OEM inventories.
Right now you can get decent high end ish machines like this: https://www.costco.com/p/-/ibuypower-element-gaming-pc-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5070-12gb-windows-11-home-32gb-ram-2tb-ssd/4000384603?langId=-1 and like 35% of the total machine cost washes out to JUST the memory right now. You'll need to replace the PSU and likely the water cooler for the long term, but the bones are relatively good.
Upgrade your GPU now, get the rest later.
I'd say buy the cheapest smallest used compatible stick of RAM you can get your hands on and use that until prices are "sane" again.
Look at it as a challenge to trim your system to run on as little RAM as possible and keep to low resource activities like 2D indie games if you were thinking of a gaming PC.
Second option is to just wait as others have said.
Soldered in RAM.