// PC GAMER — GAMING
A researcher says 'we just undid about 20 years of progress' when it comes to memory prices, so I broke out my calculator and compared actual RAM kits from 2007 to 2026
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We all know the cost of RAM is ridiculously high these days thanks to the global memory shortage. But it can be useful (and depressing) to put these prices into context historically.
To that end, scientist, developer, and software performance expert Daniel Lemire commented on X that "On a historical basis, computer memory has been falling at an exponential rate for decades. But we just undid about 20 years of progress. RAM on a per unit basis is about as expensive as it was in 2007."
They show a couple of charts that track the historical $/GB metric for RAM. However, these are a little hard to parse because of the scale and duration of the changes, so I thought I'd check with some specific prices, comparing RAM kits from 2007 to today. In other words, comparing the prices for memory that you and I, as gamers, would have actually used.
After a bit of a nostalgic scour through some of my old forum posts around that time (when I was a mere 13 years old), I discovered that in 2007 I was the proud owner of 4 GB (2x 2 GB) of DDR2-800 RAM. I'm pretty sure it was 2x 2 GB of TeamGroup Xtreem memory—and yes, that '800' means just 800 MHz.
Scouring a little more, I found that 4 GB capacity was on the upper end for 2007, and a lot of people were still using 2 GB (2x 1 GB) of DDR2, which was enough for 32-bit Windows (remember that?).
Looking at forum posts discussing deals on RAM kits, we can see that good deals on 4 GB RAM kits cost about $100 at the time. In fact, some users back then were shocked to see 4 GB of DDR2 going for so cheap. Bear in mind that these were deal prices, ie, cheaper than the norm.
Looking to 2 GB kits, there are threads highlighting deals at around $60 (or $45 after rebate).
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Judging from these, for the top capacity, back then we were looking at about $25/GB, and for the more common capacity we were looking at about $30/GB.