This week's Market Watch read: GPU prices sitting almost exactly where they sat last week, three Ryzen desktop chips priced lower and still under MSRP, and a RAM kit that took five passes to finally get its first price.
This week's Market Watch read: the first DE/FR/NL/UK numbers alongside US pricing, and a batch of same-day 7-day trend figures worth reading with real skepticism.
AMD reportedly follows NVIDIA with a 10 percent kit price rise for August, the first RX 9050 review lands about 30 percent behind the RTX 5050, and Steam's July survey puts 16GB of VRAM on top, with an asterisk.
First weekly digest from our own price tracker: 59 GPUs, CPUs, and DDR5 kits across US retail lanes. Blackwell premiums are holding, every desktop CPU we track sits below launch MSRP, and most 32GB DDR5-6000 kits hover near $500.
NVIDIA's 96GB workstation flagship has climbed 55% since launch, and reporting puts only a sliver of that on manufacturing. The rest is the same GDDR7 squeeze driving consumer prices, now visible at the very top of the product stack where there is no substitute to switch to.
A reported NVIDIA price increase covers GPU and memory kits using both GDDR7 and GDDR6, but the affected cards, regions and retail impact remain unknown.
In 2016 I replaced my GTX 980 with a GTX 1080 the moment it launched, because the gap made the decision for me. In 2026 I own an RTX 4090, the RTX 5090 is a quarter to a third faster at prices near double its MSRP, and for the first time in my years of building PCs the right upgrade is none. Here is my read on how we got here, with the numbers.
