Bring your own RAM? This new strategy for buying a PC hurts

The year is 2025. Memory prices have shot through the roof. You’re a system builder who wants to sell PCs to customers. You know people won’t pay for it at crazy high cost. So, what do you do? You let people buy a desktop computer without any RAM.

Yep, we’ve now entered an era of BYOR—Bring Your Own RAM. Or, at least, that’s the likely trend just kicked off by longtime custom PC maker Maingear. In the company’s own words:

Perhaps you’ve noticed memory prices are at record highs. We’re not happy about it, either. The rapid boom in AI infrastructure has large AI companies buying up enormous amounts of memory for their data centers. As a result, major memory manufacturers are prioritizing supply for these more profitable AI players, creating severe constraints and price surges across consumer products like PCs, laptops, and smartphones.

⚠️ Many DDR5 kits are seeing 100% to 400+% price increases⚠️

To ensure we can continue delivering the high quality MAINGEAR systems you expect, and to offer our customers a fair shake at a new build without the added costs, we’ve decided to try something new…

Have RAM already? Found a killer kit or sweet deal online? Place your order and send us your RAM, we’ll build it into your new MAINGEAR PC, test it, and tune it for performance and reliability.

For everyone who may have been tuned out from PC hardware news for the last few months, this move isn’t wildly out of place. At the start of October, a 64GB kit of DDR5-6000 memory cost a little over $200. That average has now climbed to $800, according to PCPartPicker’s tracker. (Yeah.)

Maingear’s approach is a very welcome workaround for enthusiasts. It has a potential flaw, however. Valuable goods can (and do) get stolen in the mail. So with RAM fetching a pretty penny right now, shipping memory to Maingear for installation and tuning in a new PC build seems somewhat risky. Why not also offer an option to receive instructions for recommended tweaks (timings, etc) for a particular RAM kit? Some customers would willingly give up maxed out fine-tuning for guaranteed safety of precious, precious memory.

Another sticky point: A BYOR configuration relies on the idea that a customer already has DDR5 RAM, either from having already built a system relatively recently or having caught better pricing while it existed. For everyone now looking to upgrade from a DDR4 system, finding affordable DDR5 RAM will be purely a matter of chance.

The same morning Maingear announced BYOR builds, we PCWorld staff members predicted such a trend on this year’s final episode of The Full Nerd. But not just for DDR5 systems. Possibly “new” PCs that sport older hardware architecture, compatible with DDR4 RAM. With so much DDR4 memory still in the wild, hardware releases may regress in order to meet the need for affordable upgrades.

After so many years of dramatic leaps in performance and efficiency, only one word properly summarizes that potential outcome. 

Ouch.