PC RAM prices are so high that gaming PCs with 32GB just dropped 20% on Steam

The proportion of gaming PCs with 32GB of RAM just dropped a massive 20.31% on the latest Steam Hardware Survey for March 2026. With PC RAM prices currently so high, PC gamers have seemingly been forced to either buy lower-specced hardware or have perhaps been tempted to downgrade their systems to cash in on their ultra-valuable RAM.

In an ideal world, we'd recommend 32GB as the best gaming RAM allocation for a current gaming PC. With triple-A games getting ever larger and gamers often liking to stream and record their sessions while multi-tasking with web browsers, video editors, and other apps open at the same time, 16GB can prove too little to cope. However, needs must, and gamers have seemingly voted with their wallets, according to this latest Steam data.

Reinforcing the point that gamers haven't been abandoning 32GB setups in favor of upgrading to even more RAM, the latest Steam Hardware Survey results show 16GB gaming PC configurations have jumped up 13.5%, while 12GB systems have risen 1.08%, and 8GB systems by 3.46%. There technically were rises in 64GB configurations (up 0.96%) and 60GB systems (up 0.26%), but these changes are balanced out by 48GB PCs falling 0.83% and 4GB gaming PCs rising 0.69%.

Valve doesn't offer any explanation of its own for the changes, with it merely tracking the changes month on month. Indeed, due to the voluntary nature of users opting to submit their data to the Steam Hardware Survey, we've regularly seen strange changes in any given month. So, there is a chance these drastic RAM configuration changes are just an anomaly. However, given the overall PC RAM price rise situation at the moment, it makes sense that gamers are choosing to buy only what they need.

Other interesting takeaways from the latest Steam Hardware Survey include that the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 saw a steep drop of 3.54%, knocking it from top spot for the most used GPU, down to third place. Instead, it's the RTX 3060 that tops the chart this month, just ahead of the laptop version of the RTX 4060.

Also, the generic catchall "AMD Radeon Graphics" term has risen steadily to its highest ever position, sitting in ninth position behind the likes of the Nvidia RTX 3050, 5060, and 5070. It's not clear which AMD GPUs fall into this categorization, but it's likely to be integrated GPUs, such as those found in the Steam Deck, laptop CPUs, and desktop CPUs such as the 8600G.

Valve publishes its Steam Hardware Survey each month, and you can find the full data at this URL. It tracks users' PC hardware features such as the number of CPU cores, the brand of CPU, the amount of system RAM, the GPU used, and even which VR headset is most popular with gamers.