A Weird Year!
We have not had many serious updates to our main chart this year. The hardware releases have been slow, the international scene has been volatile enough to ensure most of the PC hardware conversations centered on tariffs/prices and not releases, and some of us on the Logical Increments team have been going through some unforeseen consequences circumstances that an apple-a-day could not cure.
Hardware releases have been quite limited in 2025. We had one CPU and a handful of GPUs, all early in the year. In fact, other than one mostly mid-tier launch, things have been quite quiet since March. On the other hand, availability and price have been as exciting this year as they were during the pandemic, with hardware being fully out-of-stock for months, or only available at silly prices.
I am very grateful to still have you, dear reader, even though it has been a quiet year update-wise. But where are we now?
As Black Friday Looms . . .
As of November, most items have settled down, with the exception of RAM.
According to the reports, AI datacentres are driving extreme demand for RAM, causing the average Joe and Jane to see RAM prices nearly double. This is quite familiar, as cryptocoins did the same thing to GPUs back in the day. So, if the RAM issue is parallel to the GPU, then there’s good news and bad news: Manufacturing will increase and supply will catch up to demand, but it may take 2 to 3 years.
This year’s Black Friday should bring us some relief from the very topsy-turvy prices we have been seeing, since Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) sales are typically the best prices you see all year round.
For everything other than RAM, it is looking good. Some stores have even started early Black Friday sales super-early, calling them “Black November”. We have updated our PC recommendation charts with the latest, so feel free to take a look. In particular, the price stability means that some new PSU and case options are now recommended. If you need SSDs, we updated SSDs too, and you might want to get yours quickly before the RAM problems spill over and become SSD problems.
We will be doing the yearly Black Friday and Cyber Monday “Best of” posts as soon as possible, so watch out for those.
