$2800 is still a huge price in comparison with the last year.
Last summer, a 9950X3D + motherboard + cooler + 128 GB DRAM + VAT sales taxes was the equivalent of $1400 in Europe, where I live.
That's half of your quoted price. That was without case and PSU, but adding e.g. $200 for those would not change much.
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow).
The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive.
On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock.
Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU.
Very similar config, but I bought a second pair of ram. Running 4 sticks at 3600. Also, the LAN port of the motherboard stopped working after a week, so I had to buy an Ethernet card
Ouch, were you not willing to RMA for that ethernet port? I wouldn't be too pleased after only a week if parts of the board stopped working.
I don't really want to run my RAM that slow which is why I'll probably stick with two sticks.
Yes of course. We all know prices are up.
I commented because someone thought that $4K was the going price for 128GB of RAM, which is way too much even with the demand crunch.
Due to the high prices of DRAM and SSDs they now are the greatest fractions of the total price of a computer.
In January I was forced to upgrade an ancient Intel NUC, by replacing it with an Arrow Lake H based ASUS NUC. The complete system with 32 GB DRAM and 3 TB SSDs has cost EUR 1200, including VAT sales tax.
The distribution of the price was like this:
Since then, the prices of DDR5 and SSDs have continued to increase, so now the fraction spent for memory would be even higher than 59%.Before 2026, for so small amounts of memory its cost would have been much less than the rest of the system.