By Marios, founder of pcprice.watch and a PC builder and parts flipper from Greece, tracking eBay hardware prices across 7 markets since January 2025
Key Takeaways
- The used market broke on one specific day: July 2, 2026. Three high-capacity kits we track had drifted less than 7% for seven months, then repriced together inside 48 hours. DDR5 64GB +62.5%, DDR4 64GB +30.6%, DDR5 32GB +25.0% versus their June medians.
- The new-part shortage started nine months earlier. TrendForce flagged rising DRAM contract prices in Q3 2025; Framework began hiking module prices in December 2025. The used market simply took until July to catch up.
- Legacy DDR4 led the new-part market, not DDR5. An 8GB DDR4 module crossed above equivalent DDR5 in July 2025 after Micron’s end-of-life notice. In our used data the hardest single jump was DDR5 64GB, but both generations broke on the same day.
- The used market is a lagging indicator, and I have the exact lag. Roughly seven months from the new-part squeeze to the used-market repricing. That gap is the buying window, and it is already closing.
When did the memory squeeze actually hit the used market?
July 2, 2026. That is not an approximation. Of the memory kits I track daily on eBay, the three with enough sold volume to trust had been flat for seven straight months, and then on a single day they all stepped up at once. A used DDR5 64GB (2x32) kit that sold for a 382 EUR median in June jumped to 613 EUR on July 2, and kept climbing to 684 EUR by July 11. DDR4 64GB went from 238 EUR on July 1 to 292 EUR on July 2. DDR5 32GB (2x16) went from 265 to 328 EUR over the same 24 hours.
I flip parts, so I stare at these curves for a living. The thing that stopped me was not the size of the jump. It was that three separate kits, different generations, different capacities, sold by hundreds of different people who have never spoken to each other, all repriced on the same date. That does not happen by accident.
Across three high-capacity memory kits tracked daily on eBay, used prices drifted under 7% for seven months (December 2025 to June 2026) and then rose 25% to 62% in the two weeks after July 2, 2026. The synchronised timing across independent sellers and part generations points to a single external cause repricing the whole market at once, not normal listing noise (pcprice.watch, 2026).
A quick honesty note on method, because it matters for reading that chart. Our medians come from eBay sold listings across seven markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland), all converted to EUR. I only trust the kits with real monthly volume, which is why this piece leans on the three 32GB and 64GB kits that clear roughly 30 sold listings a month each. The single-DIMM series hinted at pressure back in late 2025, but with one to four sales a month I will not build a story on them. The big kits are the reliable lens, and the lens is clear.
What was happening to new RAM prices before July?
Everything, and for nine months. While the used market sat flat, the new-part market was already on fire, and the paper trail is unusually well documented. TrendForce recorded conventional DRAM contract prices rising 8-13% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025, then an eye-watering 93-98% in Q1 2026 (TrendForce, 2026). Total DRAM industry revenue hit 97 billion USD in Q1 2026, up 81% in a single quarter.
The cause is not a mystery either. Memory makers pointed their fabs at the customer paying the most, which in 2025 and 2026 is the AI datacenter. Server DRAM and HBM crowded out the commodity chips that end up in a gaming PC. Framework, the modular-laptop company, put real numbers on it: they raised DDR5 module pricing by 50%, landing at 10 USD/GB on December 24, 2025, then 12-16 USD/GB by February 11, 2026, and told buyers plainly it was a “massive supply and demand imbalance” from the AI buildout (Framework, 2026). When a company’s advice to its own customers is “go buy your RAM somewhere else,” the market is broken.
The retail carnage in the press through the first half of 2026 tracks the same curve. Tom’s Hardware reported 32GB DDR5 kits bottoming out at a 375 USD floor, a G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64GB kit passing 600 USD (more than a whole PS5), and eBay scalpers listing some kits above 2,000 USD, roughly seven times their original value (Tom’s Hardware, 2026). This is the same demand story that has been dragging flagship GPUs upward, which I broke down in our GPU price analysis. Same buyer, different aisle.
Why did the used market wait seven months to react?
Because used stock does not have a wholesale price. When DRAM contract prices double, a retailer’s next pallet costs double, and the shelf price moves within the week. But a used kit on eBay was already bought, already sitting in someone’s drawer. The seller’s mental anchor is what they paid for it a year ago, not what a fab charges Samsung today. The used market only reprices when enough individual sellers notice the new-part price and think, wait, mine is worth more than that. That realisation spreads person by person, and it is slow, right up until it is not.
That is the seven-month lag in one sentence. The squeeze was public knowledge by December 2025. It took until July 2026 for it to reach critical mass among used sellers, and when it did, it went off like a chain reaction. The chart below is the whole thesis: near-flat drift for seven months, then a wall.
If you want to see this on any part yourself, every model page on pcprice.watch carries a live six-month history that updates every eight hours. The best PC part price tracker comparison walks through how we build these medians and where the numbers come from.
Did DDR4 or DDR5 get hit harder?
It depends whether you mean new or used, and the honest answer splits in two. In the new-part market, legacy DDR4 led the whole thing. TrendForce reported that in July 2025, an 8GB DDR4 module crossed above the price of an equivalent DDR5 module for the first time ever (TrendForce, 2025). That is a genuinely strange thing to happen. Older, slower memory selling for more than its faster replacement only makes sense when the old stuff is going extinct. Micron had just issued end-of-life notices for DDR4, and Samsung and SK Hynix then reversed their own phase-out plans to keep milking what TrendForce called an “unexpected cash cow.”
In our used data, the ranking flips. The single hardest jump on July 2 was DDR5 64GB (2x32) at +62.5% month over month, ahead of DDR4 64GB at +30.6%. I would not over-read that gap, because used pricing is messier than contract pricing and the DDR5 64GB kit is a thinner, pricier segment where each sale swings the median more. The clean takeaway is simpler: both generations broke on the same day. The squeeze did not care what was in the notch. It repriced capacity, full stop.
There is a practical upshot buried in the DDR4 end-of-life story. If you are running an older AM4 or LGA1200 build, your upgrade path just got more expensive than your platform, because the DDR4 you would buy to top it up is now a scarcity good. I get into which platform still makes sense in can I use DDR3 and DDR4 RAM together, but the short version is that a used-DDR4 top-up in mid-2026 is worth pricing carefully before you commit.
Is this the Overclock.net “$240 to $920” story?
Probably, and my data says the direction is real even if I cannot verify that exact figure. There is a widely-passed-around Overclock.net forum post in which a user says they bought a G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64GB DDR5 kit for about 240 USD in August, then watched the same kit list for around 920 USD. I want to be straight with you: that is an unverified forum claim. The thread is real, but the specific post sits behind a paywall I could not read through, so treat the 240-to-920 number as one person’s anecdote, not a data point.
What I can stand behind is that the shape of that story matches my chart exactly. A 64GB DDR5 kit that nearly quadruples is extreme, but it is the same kind of move, in the same part class, over the same window, that my used-market median shows going from 382 to 684 EUR. The anecdote is the viral version. The tracker is the boring, repeatable, seven-market version that says the anecdote is not a fluke.
What should you do about RAM right now?
Three situations, three answers, and they are genuinely different depending on who you are.
- You need RAM in the next month. Buy used, and buy the kit that some seller has not yet repriced. The whole point of a seven-month lag is that the market is not uniform: on any given day a fraction of listings are still anchored to old prices. Sort by price, check the live medians so you know what “cheap” actually means today, and pounce on anything meaningfully under the current median. That arbitrage window is closing, not opening.
- You are mid-build and can wait a quarter. You are making a bet, and right now the odds are bad. TrendForce forecasts another 58-63% contract-price rise in Q2 2026, and no memory maker has announced new commodity capacity. Waiting for RAM to get cheaper in 2026 is betting against a trend with no visible brake.
- You are pricing a whole system to buy or sell. Memory just became a line item that matters again. If you are valuing a used PC, the RAM inside it is worth materially more than it was in June. Our how much is my PC worth guide runs the sum-of-parts method with current numbers, and the memory row is the one that moved.
Frequently asked questions
When did RAM prices actually go up on the used market in 2026?
On our eBay tracker, July 2, 2026. High-capacity kit medians had moved less than 7% over the prior seven months, then repriced together in a 48-hour window: DDR5 64GB from a 382 EUR June median to 613 EUR, DDR4 64GB from 238 to 292 EUR, DDR5 32GB from 265 to 328 EUR.
Why is RAM so expensive in 2026?
AI datacenter demand pulled fab capacity toward server DRAM and HBM, starving the commodity DDR4 and DDR5 supply PC builders rely on. TrendForce measured conventional DRAM contract prices up 8-13% in Q4 2025 and 93-98% in Q1 2026. Framework raised its own module pricing to 10 USD/GB in December 2025 and 12-16 USD/GB by February 2026.
Did DDR4 or DDR5 rise faster in the 2026 memory squeeze?
In the new-part market, legacy DDR4 led: an 8GB DDR4 module crossed above equivalent DDR5 in July 2025 after Micron’s end-of-life notice. In our used data both broke on the same July 2026 day, with DDR5 64GB posting the single largest jump at +62.5% month over month versus DDR4 64GB at +30.6%.
Should I buy used RAM now or wait?
If you need capacity, buy a used kit that a seller has not yet repriced, because the seven-month lag means some listings still sit at old prices. Waiting is a weak bet: TrendForce forecasts a further 58-63% contract-price rise in Q2 2026 with no announced supply relief.
How much did used 64GB DDR5 cost before and after the spike?
A used DDR5 64GB (2x32) kit held a 365-382 EUR median from December 2025 through June 2026, then jumped to 613 EUR on July 2 and reached 684 EUR by July 11, a 62.5% move in under two weeks.
What to do with this
The single most useful thing I can hand you is the date. The memory squeeze reached the used market on July 2, 2026, and it did so as a step change, not a slope. If you bought RAM before then, you caught the last of the calm. If you are buying now, you are on the other side of the wall, and your job is to find the sellers who have not looked at the new-part price yet.
The bigger lesson is about the used market itself. It is a lagging indicator, and lag is a gift if you can measure it. The new-part shortage was screaming for nine months while used prices sat still. Anyone watching both numbers at once had a long, obvious window to buy ahead of the repricing. That is the entire reason I built the tracker: not to tell you RAM is expensive, which the whole internet already knows, but to timestamp the exact day it became expensive where you actually shop. We re-pull every eight hours across seven markets, so the next time a curve breaks, you will see the day it happens.
Sources: pcprice.watch tracker, daily eBay sold-listing prices across 7 national markets (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland), normalised to EUR, focused on three kits (DDR4 64GB 2x32, DDR5 32GB 2x16, DDR5 64GB 2x32) with n ≈ 30 sold listings per month, December 2025 through July 11 2026. New-part contract data from TrendForce press releases (Sept 24 2025, June 1 2026) and DDR4 end-of-life reporting (Sept 2 2025). Module pricing from Framework’s memory pricing blog (Dec 2025, Feb 2026). Retail examples from Tom’s Hardware (2026). The Overclock.net 240-to-920 USD figure is an unverified user anecdote, presented as such.
Retrieved 2026-07-16.
