DDR5 Closes a 500 Percent Year, and NVIDIA Sells at RRP While Supplies Last

US DDR5 kits close out a year of roughly 500 percent gains, monitor vendors warn distributors, and the one place selling RTX 50 Founders Editions at RRP is a queue in Cologne.

Saya3 minute readMarket & Pricing

The memory bill keeps writing itself into new places. DDR5 closes out a year of roughly 500 percent gains with monitor vendors already warning distributors, and the strangest price news of Gamescom week is that paying RRP for a Founders Edition requires physically standing in Cologne.

DDR5 is up nearly 500 percent in a year, and monitors are next in line

US retail DDR5 kits are running between 372 percent (2 x 16 GB DDR5-4800) and 485 percent (2 x 32 GB DDR5-5600) above where they sat a year ago on PCPartPicker's tracking, with a 64 GB DDR5-6000 kit that used to go for $222 now around $1,272 (TechPowerUp on the PCPartPicker data). DDR4 is up 120 to 177 percent, and ComputerBase's Eurozone tracking puts August at roughly 345 percent year over year. These are retail tracker snapshots rather than contract prices, so the figures will move, but the direction has not wavered in twelve months.

Flash runs the same play. TrendForce puts second-quarter combined revenue for the top five listed NAND brands at $68.87 billion, up 77 percent quarter over quarter, with Micron climbing to third on a 99.2 percent jump (TrendForce on 2Q26 NAND revenue). The structural line in that release matters more than the revenue: suppliers are pointing capital expenditure at DRAM and HBM, capping how much new NAND capacity arrives, while AI server demand for enterprise SSDs absorbs what exists.

KTC has told customers that component costs passed the point it can absorb internally and that prices across its lineup may rise, without naming models or a date, while AOC's China operation notified distributors of increases effective August 1, citing panels, power components, and manufacturing (VideoCardz on KTC's warning, VideoCardz on the AOC notice). The AOC adjustment is regional as announced; whether it spreads to other markets is not something either company has said.

Into that market, Lexar announced the Thor Ultra line: PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 2280 drives from 512 GB to 4 TB, rated up to 11 GB/s read and 10 GB/s write on 1 TB and larger, DRAM-less with a 6 nm controller leaning on host memory buffer, endurance from 350 TBW to 3,000 TBW behind a five-year warranty (TechPowerUp on the Thor Ultra). Pricing and availability were not announced, which in August 2026 is its own kind of statement.

The Gen 5 drive is the easy thing to defer in all of this: the interface premium buys sequential bandwidth that rarely shows up in game load times, and at current flash pricing the capacity is worth more than the number on the box.

Founders Edition cards at RRP, if you happen to be in Cologne

NVIDIA's lounge in Hall 6 is selling limited RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Founders Edition cards at European RRP, one per order, while supplies last. It is a booth promotion with no unit count attached, and it should not be read as a supply signal. It is still a small indictment of the market that our current price tracking shows every RTX 50 card we follow trading above its launch MSRP in US retail, which makes standing in a queue in Germany a defensible purchasing strategy rather than a joke.

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