Americans and Brits complain that a good gaming PC has become more expensive than a used Audi

For years, the main selling point of PC gaming was affordability. Build a system once, and it ends up cheaper than a console in the long run.

That logic broke down so badly in 2026 that a used car now sometimes costs less than a PC built for streaming.

That's the comparison a woman from Ireland made in a video that spread across the internet. She was responding to the popular claim that "a good PC costs a 2 week paycheck at most in 2026".

Scrolling through Amazon UK prices, where a single RAM kit goes for over 400 dollars, she tallied up more than 4000 euros for a streaming setup and put it next to car listings under 3000.

The root of the problem is no secret at this point – the AI boom. Memory makers are shifting production to HBM for data centers, and output for years ahead has already been bought up by major clients.

Micron even announced it's leaving the consumer market under the Crucial brand. Things got absurd enough that the owner of a home server with 144TB of drives, 8TB of SSD storage, and 64GB of RAM said he built it for about 3500 dollars, and now the hard drives alone are worth 8000.

One industry insider put it bluntly:

It's bad and it's probably staying bad for a while. I suggest making an occasional offering to the machine gods for the protection of your ram.

Still, the video raises some questions. A good gaming build doesn't require an RTX 5080 or 5090, and a setup with an RTX 4070 Ti Super and Ryzen 7 7800X3D cost under 2000 dollars before prices spiked.

And "two weeks of pay" sounds like a joke in some places. In Brazil, a single RX 7600 costs around 1.3 times the minimum monthly wage.

The cheap cars in the video have an explanation too. The UK and Ireland drive on the left, so right-hand-drive cars are hard to export to the continent, flooding the secondhand market. On top of that, the cheap car example she used was an Audi A6 with 339,000 kilometers on it.