PC Hardware price changes for 2018 - analysis and speculation

Last year was a mixed bag for prices in terms of PC hardware. On the one hand, CPU prices dropped like rock, to the point where Intel slashed prices in HALF on the Enthusiast platform, as a reaction to Ryzen. And then, at the beginning of this year, AMD lowered its prices too because of the 6 core Coffee Lake. But in other segments we got a pounding. Video cards prices became insane, SSDs are still way above where they'll be a threat to HDDs, GPU prices went up like mad because of the crypto craze, and RAM... well, this is where RAM is now compared to 2 years ago.

But how are things going to go for 2018? Well, I can't speak for the entire year, but I can try my best to give you a general idea about what is the expected current trend for PC hardware prices for the beginning of this year. I'm basing this information on reports from various analysts in the industry, from places la DRAMExchange, statements made by companies in the industry, and my own gut feeling about what's going on. Let's begin with something that isn't that critical. 

SSD prices.

 All the storage memory in SSDs is called NAND Flash... well, not the one in the Intel Optane ones, that's Xpoint, and the price for that one will not drop until 2019-2020.  NAND Flash has currently two problems that constantly make it cost a lot: complexity of current production and high demand. This type of memory is sought after by not just SSD makers, but by phone makers and tablet makers as well, and since the capacity of phones is increasing, so will demand.
But, there is a silver lining. One of the main reasons that price has not dropped more, although SSDs showed a descent in price a few years ago, is a switch from planar 2D NAND, where the memory is put in just a single layer, to 3D NAND. This means that there are more layers of memory, leading to higher capacity, and better speed because more chips are used at the same time, it's not all in "a line", if you will, it's a paralel process of writing/reading, more of the SSD being used at the same time. The switch started about 2 years ago, and it's now at a point where it is nearing completion, the costs associated with it are being absorbed, and we should notice a small decrease in price at the start of this year, because the demand won't saturate the supply as much. It should't be a large drop in price, and it won't last for long, because in the fall phone makers will announce new generations of devices, meaning that by the beginning of summer they'll already be buying up NAND left and right. However, it's expected for the supply to jump up more during 2019, and then we may see better prices for SSDs. I'm hoping that that will mean that the successor of the Samsung Evo 960 with a 500GB capacity will drop from 250$ to around 200$ next year. If you're from Europe, like me, those prices are in Euros, and therefor higher, and in a lot of cases there's some extra costs associated, with a local store around here having them "on sale" for a higher price than I can get them from Amazon Germany+shipping.

CPU Prices

April is going to be a really interesting time for new CPU purchases. AMD's Ryzen CPUs will be out then. The 2000 series, and it should have the same price as the initial Ryzen ones on launch. So for a 2800X you will probably be paying around 550$, or you would, if Intel hadn't been putting the pressure on AMD with its own parts. I'm hoping that there will be a small price cut for the new series too, not as big as for the current one. So you probably won't get to see a Ryzen 2800X for 450$, but 500$ isn't out of the question. Then it should be around 350$ for the 2700X, and the rest will be a lot closer to the pricing of the originals, because they didn't have a large drop anyway. As for Intel, I don't think their new CPUs will be out in april, there may be an 8 core variant based again on Coffee Lake, with slight tweaks. And there'll also be a Cascade Lake-X series at the end of the year. Prices for these should be about the same as we have now, I don't see any big changes unless AMD will out of the blue slice prices even deeper, thereby igniting a price war that will let us all upgrade our processors. 

RAM Prices

Oh, boy, is this going to hurt. Currently RAM prices are registering a small dip, and I mean small. Around 5%, and it probably won't last for long. In order to get 16GB of DDR4 3000MHz RAM you will still be paying 2X of what that same RAM cost in 2016. I don't think the price will drop, unless someone at Samsung actually goes to jail (their CEO was "forgiven" for the bribery he was convicted of in a different case) as a result of the investigation currently underway, thanks to China.  There won't be a noticeable price drop for half the year. At the end of 2018 you may see a dip, because only then is RAM production going to ramp up enough to maybe, maybe catch up to demand... maybe. Phone makers are also going to increase RAM amount in general, so things may iron out and still leave us stuck in this situation until late 2019. 

Video Card prices

And here's the most painful one of all. I don't see video card prices dropping back to where they should be too soon. When the new Radeon cards, based on Vega+, or whatever they'll call it drop, they will still be eaten up by crypto miners. I have the hope that at least the Nvidia ones will be available at decent(er) prices than what you can currently find them at, if you can even find them in stock anymore. There was the expectation that when the "crypto bubble burst" two weeks ago, video card prices would go back to normal, but people with that expectation don't understand that crypto is still worth a ton of money. So until mining difficulty goes so high that it can only be done via ASIC or through multi-system schemes, like Coinhive, video card prices will still be high. That being said, once new stock comes in, once shelves are filled with new products, there will be an initial dip in prices, around April-June, until the crypto miners buy them all again and we are left with nothing. If we're lucky, the miners will stick tot he dedicated mining cards. I've seen Nvidia recommend that stores not cater to crypto miners, like by not selling 10 cards to a single person, but that won't do anything. Not when Sapphire or MSI ship batches of 1000 gaming cards directly to a single person, usually somewhere in China. New regulations limiting the crypto market locally should help, since they won't be able to "export" the crypto to foreign exchanges... well, they can, but it won't be as easy to do it directly. That may quell the thirst for gaming GPUs and actually leave some for the rest of us that actually want them for video games. Hopefully.

So, in closing, it'll be a great year for CPUs, a horrible year for everything else. I didn't mention HDD, PSU or Motherboards, because there's no change expected in their prices. Have fun upgrading this year, it'll be a nightmare if you're no a budget.

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