Shopping for RAM? You may want to get a prebuilt or a laptop instead.

It's almost Black Friday. You haven't started shopping for gifts — or for yourself — yet. Maybe there's a PC builder in your life. Maybe that's you. Either way, one thing is for sure: The price of RAM has skyrocketed, which will make building your own system more expensive than it was a few months ago. But those price hikes haven't yet hit prebuilt systems, including desktops and laptops, in part because the companies that make them have stockpiled memory to keep their supply chains moving.

As of this writing, you can get an entire PlayStation 5 for less than a 64GB RAM kit. So yes: If you're willing to let someone else build your system, it may be a far better deal to buy one of the best gaming PCs, best gaming laptops, or best ultrabooks before AI’s seemingly insatiable demand for RAM and storage causes price hikes on systems, too.

A lot of us prefer to build their own PCs. I get it! But this isn't the first time that financial wisdom has pointed to prebuilts. The same was true when GPU prices went orbital during the perfect storm of the COVID pandemic lockdowns and crypto mining on GPUs.

Let's do some price comparisons and see how this all shakes out. For an example, we'll use the CyberPower PC Gamer Xtreme gaming desktop, which we recently reviewed and uses all standardized parts. For some components, we had to make swaps for availability, so we used something comparable in those cases.

The total on our parts list is $1,322.80, or more than $200 over the $1,099.99 CyberPowerPC. And for Black Friday, the CyberPowerPC is down to $849.99, which is a price you couldn't come close to without making compromises when building on your own now. It sure doesn't help that when separated out, the RAM and graphics card are almost the same price.

Also, if you were building this yourself, you'd probably want a nicer PSU, which could add to the cost. You might also be able to bring along an existing Windows license or find a way to pay less, which could drop the price.

If you're looking for laptops, it's a bit harder to price out. After all, you can't usually build your own laptop from parts. Framework, the company that allows more upgrades and customization options than any other laptop manufacturer, shows that now is the time to buy. The company hasn't changed pricing yet, but has removed standalone RAM from its store and wrote on X that "Our memory costs from our suppliers are increasing substantially though, so it is likely we will need to increase memory pricing soon."

Framework is smaller than Dell, HP, Apple, and Lenovo, which almost certainly have larger supplies. But even their stock won't last forever, and depending on what the RAM pricing crisis looks like at that point, it would not be surprising to see prices go up from even the biggest companies. That will be the case for both ultrabooks and gaming laptops (perhaps even more for the latter, given that GPUs have their own RAM).

It's at least somewhat fortuitous that this rise in RAM pricing is occurring during a deals event. If you can find a good deal on a gaming PC or a laptop, it might be the lowest price you can find for a long time.

If all you really care about is gaming, it might also a good time to buy a console or a handheld. Those prices are already higher than they were last year, and it's possible they'll go higher still if the memory squeeze continues. It's the opposite of the way consoles usually work — they typically get cheaper as time goes on — but we live in surprising times.

RAM on its own is expensive now. But systems with memory in them already have it accounted for. There's no telling how long that will last, but until prices increase, you’ll likely save some money by buying a system that's already built. Building your own PC has, yet again, become something you’ll likely have to pay extra for.

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