Sellers in China have stopped printing price lists for PC components — prices now change several times a day

At Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen's largest electronics market, vendors abandoned fixed price tags this summer: the final price gets quoted on the spot, and price sheets get updated several times a day. The reason is that the cost of memory, storage, and graphics cards in China is rising faster than stores can reprint their paperwork. For a gamer planning to upgrade or build a new PC, the situation has turned ugly: everything that can't be cut from a build has gotten more expensive at once — RAM and SSDs. Chinese reviewers argue that building your own PC has lost its main advantage in the process, and now often ends up costing more than buying a prebuilt system with the same specs.

The logic here is simple. Large PC manufacturers are sitting on older stock, work off long-term contracts, and buy components in bulk, so their prices rise slower than the market. An individual buyer has no such protection — they pay today's retail price for every single part. Since October 2025, average DDR4 and DDR5 prices have more than tripled, with some kits up sixfold; a 16GB DDR5 module hit nearly $300 at its peak. A 512GB drive now costs around $74 — roughly the same price that got you four times the storage two years ago.

Graphics cards followed close behind. Over the past year, the RTX 5070 has gone from 4,500–5,000 yuan to 6,000–6,500 yuan, and the RTX 5080 from around 8,000 yuan to nearly 12,000. Average gaming CPU platform prices are up 48% year over year. A prebuilt system that cost around 5,000 yuan last summer now runs 7,000–8,000, and buyers report their budget climbing by a couple thousand yuan over the course of a single week's wait.

Prebuilt machines are getting more expensive too, though — just with a delay, as old stock runs out. A telling example: mini PCs built on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395. A year ago, systems like that cost around $1,500; now they're closer to $3,000. There's no relief in sight either: AMD and NVIDIA have pushed back their next graphics card generation, with the new architecture not expected before mid-2027, and some forecasts point to early 2028 instead. Intel has essentially dropped out of the fight for the mainstream gaming segment.

The fallout is already showing up in the numbers: global PC shipments are set to drop 10–12% this year, individual buyers are putting off upgrades, and corporate customers are canceling orders. Self-building's old advantage — a basket of parts always coming out cheaper than a branded box — isn't coming back anytime soon.

Have you built or upgraded a PC in the past year? Tell us in the comments how much it cost you and where you had to cut corners.