DDR5 prices are soaring: a 192 GB Corsair kit was traded for an RTX 5070 Ti. Why RAM is treated like cash on the secondhand market—and what it means for GPUs.
© A. Krivonosov
A story making the rounds on social media tells how a user swapped a Corsair DDR5 memory kit with a total capacity of 192 GB for a PNY GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. What drew the most attention wasn’t the graphics card, but the RAM itself: with DDR5 prices spiking, such kits are increasingly treated on the secondhand market almost like a stand-in for cash.
According to figures shared in the discussion, a Corsair Vengeance RGB 192 GB (4×48 GB) DDR5-5200 CL38 kit in the U.S. now hovers around $2,225, while a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti typically goes for about $750. By that math, the RAM owner traded away an asset worth roughly three times the GPU’s price. Commenters describe the deal as decidedly one-sided and argue that, at that budget, it would have been reasonable to hold out for a higher-tier graphics card.
The episode reads like another telling symptom of a market that’s lost its balance. The thread shows screenshots with prices for 192 GB DDR5 kits near $2,250 and notes that finding them anywhere close to their old tags has become almost impossible. And there’s a clear warning note: if memory keeps climbing, barters of this kind may creep into the territory of even more expensive GPUs, nudging the market toward yet another round of price recalibration.