The RAM crisis has grown even more limbs during the month of October. If the memory shortage was incarnated in physical form, it’d have more legs than a spider at this point, and be a multi-limbed monstrosity with a bite that’s getting nastier by the day as more negative news seems to roll in at a frightening pace. Just this week, we’ve witnessed SK Hynix predicting that RAM supply woes are going nowhere and will persist through to 2030 , after Dell’s CEO recently warned that we’re stuck with this crisis until the end of the decade, and Intel’s chief exec agreed – on top of other similar forecasts from earlier this month . The latest nugget of doom is from Samsung, with the memory chip maker giving out similar vibes to its rival SK Hynix when reporting its financial results (as Wccftech spotted ), informing us that RAM shortages will get worse next year, and supply will remain thin on the ground in 2028, too. You can barely catch a breath between the various dire predictions during the past month. Naturally, in the face of such grimness, it’s human nature to try to look on the bright side, or in this case, at least attempt to find a glimmer of light shining through from somewhere. There must be something, right? Well, there is: Black Friday. An event with a distinctly gloomy name, ironically, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is going to be a very important sales season from the computing and PC point of view (and likely other tech, too). Mainly because I expect that the deals you’ll get this year will likely be the best prices to be had in a long while, and possibly this entire decade, if those ‘it’s here until 2030’ voices are correct in their assertions about the RAM crisis. But I hear you (possibly) cry: given all these price hikes, isn’t Black Friday going to be a wash anyway? At least based on what we saw with Amazon’s recent Prime Day sales ? And yes, that’s a fair point. You should manage your expectations with the discounts that’ll be on offer, certainly, and don’t expect to snag a bargain on RAM sticks or that beefy SSD you’ve been dreaming about. That just isn’t happening (to no one’s surprise). However, on Prime Day, there were some decent deals to be had, for example on GPUs. Notably on the RTX 5080, where if you grabbed the deal I highlighted back then , you saved yourself 20% (£300) compared to the price of the cheapest model of that Nvidia GPU on Amazon now (at the time of writing). So, given that, what should you be looking at buying this Black Friday, which is less than a month away now ( with early offers starting already )? Well, the best deals will likely be in the products set to be more affected by the memory shortage as time rolls on, and I’m going to highlight what I believe are a few key areas bargain hunters should focus on when it comes to the PC sphere. Graphics cards
(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler) I’m putting this one front and center because I believe this should be a priority for PC owners who are looking at a GPU upgrade at some point in the not-too-distant-future. As I already mentioned, there were some decent graphics card deals on Prime Day earlier this month – albeit when it comes to the higher-end GPUs, the word ‘decent’ translates to ‘not inflated’, which isn’t quite the same thing. Still, the problem is that prices are likely to rise a good deal more next year, and if you do need a higher-end GPU in particular, during 2027 I think there’s a good chance pricing will get a lot worse. Meaning that what you’ll pay on Black Friday, with the odd scattered deal on the likes of an Nvidia RTX 5070 model or AMD RX 9070 XT – and maybe even an RTX 5080 – will be a relative bargain (maybe for quite some time to come). I think this is especially true given the rumors around the RTX 5090 being discontinued (Nvidia has insisted it isn’t, but even so, something’s clearly amiss with the flagship GPU somewhere), and the ridiculous inflation the RTX 5080 has seen over the past month…
