If you have been putting off a build waiting for prices to settle, this week ended that argument. Processors, memory and graphics cards all moved the wrong way at once, and each for a different reason.
None of it is a rumour. One number comes from a chief financial officer on stage, one from a market researcher, and one you can check in any shop right now.
CPU prices are going up, Intel first
Intel is reported to be raising prices by about 10 percent from October. AMD has not named a figure, but its chief financial officer Jean Hu said the quiet part in public at an investor conference: if wafer prices go up, the company absolutely wants to share that with customers.
That last sentence is the whole story in one line. Making chips got more expensive, and neither company intends to absorb it.
There is a useful detail buried in it. The rise lands hardest on the newest chips, the ones made on the latest processes, and lightest on older parts. A Ryzen 7 7800X3D starting around 274 euro is in the calmer half of that split, and it is still one of the best gaming processors you can buy. That is not a coincidence, it is the shape of the price increase.
Memory is the worst of the three
TrendForce expects consumer DRAM to see the strongest price rise of any memory segment in the third quarter. Standard DRAM is forecast at 13 to 18 percent, and the consumer part rises harder than that.
The reason is not demand from gamers. Manufacturers have cut what they send to the consumer market and pointed the production at servers, where the money is. Server memory, the HBM and the registered modules, gets the priority allocation. Your DDR5 kit gets what is left.
For scale: DDR5 kit prices have more than quadrupled through this memory crisis. There was a short easing in spring and then the climb resumed over the summer. If you have been telling yourself you will grab 32 GB later, later has been getting more expensive every quarter for a while now.
The graphics card price that does not really exist
The third one is not an increase, it is something stranger. NVIDIA still lists the RTX 5090 at 1,999 dollars, the RTX 5080 at 999 and the RTX 5070 at 549. Those are the official prices in September 2026.
In a German shop an RTX 5090 costs around 5,000 euro.
The gap exists because the Founders Edition, the card that actually sells at the list price, has stopped being a retail product. NVIDIA now hands them out in small batches at gaming events through a priority access programme: PAX East in March, QuakeCon and Gamescom in August, PAX West in September. At Gamescom the sale ran in two hour windows on three days of the show.
Call that what it is. A recommended price nobody can buy at is a marketing number, not a price. And the reading that makes sense of it is unflattering but logical: flooding retail with cards at list price would undercut the board partners selling their own designs for considerably more.
What to actually do about it
- If memory is on your list, buy the memory first. It is the component with a named forecast pointing up this quarter, and the one that already quadrupled. Everything else in a build is more patient than RAM right now.
- Do not wait for a processor to get cheaper. Intel's rise starts in October and AMD has told investors it intends to pass costs on. Waiting is now the expensive option, which is the opposite of the usual advice.
- Ignore list prices on graphics cards entirely. Look at what a card costs in a shop that will ship it to you this week. Anything else is a number for press releases.
- The previous generation is the calm half of the market. Older processors on older processes are the least affected by the increase, and they were already the value picks.
We track our own prices for exactly this kind of week, because a recommendation built on last quarter's numbers is worse than no recommendation. If you want the current shape of the graphics market rather than the list prices, we went through it in the piece on the second quarter.
Sources
The reported Intel price increase of about 10 percent from October 2026 comes from DigiTimes as reported by ComputerBase on 9 September 2026. The statement by AMD chief financial officer Jean Hu about sharing wafer price increases with customers was made at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference and reported in the same article, as is the note that the newest processors on the N2 and N3 processes are affected most while older parts such as the Ryzen 7 7800X3D from around 274 euro are affected less. The forecast that consumer DRAM will see the strongest price increase in the third quarter of 2026, the figure of 13 to 18 percent for standard DRAM, the explanation that suppliers have restricted supply to the consumer market in favour of server products, and the note that DDR5 kit prices have more than quadrupled during the memory crisis come from TrendForce as reported by ComputerBase. The official September 2026 prices of 1,999 dollars for the GeForce RTX 5090, 999 for the RTX 5080 and 549 for the RTX 5070, the street price of around 5,000 euro for an RTX 5090 in Germany, the sale of Founders Edition cards through a priority access programme at PAX East in March 2026, QuakeCon and Gamescom in August 2026 and PAX West in September 2026, and the two hour sales windows on three days of Gamescom come from ComputerBase. The buying advice is ours.
