With the ridiculous costs of RAM and video cards lately, you may be better off buying a prebuilt desktop.
Dear god, you're not kidding. I know crypto-mining is blowing up the GPU market, but what the hell is going on with RAM? I bought 32GB (2x16GB) of desktop DDR4-2400 a year ago and it was only $185, but now it's $320.
For decades, computer memory has been a boom / bust cycle... prices would go up, everybody built new memory fabs and created massive new supply that flooded the market and tanked prices, which led to memory producers going broke and getting bought up by other memory producers. Today, there are only 3 companies left in the world that make DRAM in any meaningful quantity (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron). In addition, unlike most products, memory quality has a negative correlation to price, meaning older DRAM is actually more expensive per bit than new DRAM due to density increases. There is no way to "I'll just build kinda-crappy DRAM and sell it cheaper" in this market. The best is also the cheapest.
China would love to splash this particular pool and flood the market with cheap product, but due to the fact that they lack intellectual property, a modern fab costs upwards of 5 billion to build (and 2 years to complete), and by the time they figure out how to build price competitive DRAM they won't be able to sell it for anything near a profit, they literally can't, no matter how many resources they throw at the problem. I've read reports that the Chinese gov't would be willing to spend 100+ billion to get into the DRAM business, but it still doesn't matter. The processes, knowledge, and equipment that goes into producing modern memory is so advanced that there is a nearly insurmountable moat to bridge.
There are solutions on the horizon, the most promising being 3dXpoint (which is part of a joint venture between Intel and Micron... it's a new type of memory that uses a special type of glass to store bits instead of traditional transistors) that should reduce the amount of DRAM necessary in a given system as it looks like it kinda sits between what DRAM and NAND (SSDs), performance wise. Until then, unless one of the 3 remaining companies decides that they don't like making tons of money producing DRAM, or people decide they don't want fast computers anymore, higher prices are probably going to remain the norm.
