RAM prices took to the skies in 2017, and remained airborne throughout 2018. This year, RAM prices have landed, settled down, and are considering digging an underground cave in preparation for Armageddon, and are expected to go down even further.
Choosing RAM can be daunting, because this decision has a tangible impact on your performance. How many browser tabs can you keep open? How smooth is your video editing timeline? How fast will your game load? All of this is directly affected by your choice of RAM.
Late 2025 Update: RAM prices have more than doubled this year, due to astronomical demand from AI datacenters. Unfortunately, this pricing pressure isn’t expected to be alleviated until later in 2026 at the earliest. And since memory factories take billions of dollars and years to build, there won’t be much relief coming from the supply side.
If you’re upgrading and can wait, I would recommend waiting.
If you’re building a new PC and need RAM, shop around and hope to find a deal. Perhaps make the old fashioned choice of buying half the RAM you want now, and buying the second half once prices come back down to earth.
Recently, a user asked about RAM speeds and why we don’t recommend the fastest RAM possible, or the RAM with the lowest latency. After all, isn’t faster always better?
For all RAM, performance increases when speed increases and when latency decreases. However, the benefit from increasing speed far outweighs the performance loss of increasing latency. (For more information on this, read Crucial’s article on Speed vs. Latency.)