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.
PC photo by Nikitarama
Your computer has faithfully been by your side for all these years. You can’t replace it (for whatever reason), but with Christmas coming up, you decide it’s time to give your little friend a much-deserved gift.
Or maybe it’s frustrating you with sluggishness. Either way, you’ve got a great excuse to give it a little performance boost. What I’m here to do is to help you figure out what you can do to upgrade your older system on a budget.
So, let’s discover how to upgrade an older PC.
This list is more suited to people who fit the following:
It is okay if the above doesn’t quite apply to you. This info can still be really helpful. Just keep in mind that you might have different upgrade options than listed.
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.
I cannot claim that DDR3 was my first RAM-love; DDR2 has that honour. Or shame, if you prefer. But DDR3 has a special place in my heart, for it was the only RAM that was available when I built my PC. It was also the only RAM available when Orion and I built our office. For about a decade, it was the only RAM for normal users.
In the big wide world of hard drives, SSDs, RAM, VRAM, fancy CPU tech, and more—we felt it was about time to have a bit of a deep dive into data transfer rates.
That way, even if you’re working from an example PC build in our main build chart, you’ll know exactly what kind of speed and overall bandwidth you’re getting for your money!
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.)
RAM (short for Random Access Memory) is an essential part of every computer, because it holds all of the data your computer is currently using. Think of it as your computer’s short-term memory, whereas the hard drive is more like long-term memory. If you use your computer whilst at work though then it might be a good idea to check out something like this least privilege manager
software, to make sure that your computer is safe.
Why is RAM important? How much RAM do you need, and how fast does it need to be? We’re going to answer those questions, and hopefully clear up some common myths about RAM along the way. If this question and other tech related issues cause confusion or if your business’s computer systems aren’t acting in the way you want, it’s best you get in touch with an IT Support Company.