A hot potato: If a consumer product is difficult to notice, yous tin well-nigh guarantee that people volition exist selling information technology on eBay for inflated prices. Joining the many graphics cards, PlayStation 5 consoles, and Xbox Serial 10 machines on the site are DDR5 memory kits, which are selling for up to $two,500.

Retailers were already selling DDR5 kits for high prices in the runup to Alder Lake's release terminal month. They sold out apace, leaving upgraders with the option of buying a DDR4-compatible Z690 board. And as we all know, high need combined with low supply is the dream combination for eBay scalpers.

PCMag reports on some of the obscenely priced kits on the auction site. Information technology appears that the virtually expensive item right at present is a Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB (2 10 16GB) DDR5 SDRAM 5200MHz kit that has a Buy It Now price of $2,499. Corsair lists the memory at $340 on its website, significant the eBay seller is marking it upward by 635%.

Elsewhere, nosotros see some 16GB DDR5 RAM kits from Oloy going for around $800—a 600% markup over the $160 retail price.

eBay's own Terapeak tool shows that the average selling price of DDR5 memory over the past month is $531, while the highest selling price sits at $2,500. There has also been $86,671 in full sales.

Making the situation even worse for buyers is a shortage of power direction integrated circuits (PMICs) integrated into DDR5 modules, pushing procurement time up to an estimated 35 weeks.

At that place certainly aren't many DDR5 kits on eBay compared to the mountain of graphics cards and consoles, but the just people who would want them correct now are those with a compatible Alder Lake motherboard, so the target audience is smaller. Owners of Intel'south latest chips could e'er opt for a DDR4-compatible Z690 mobo, though these tend to accept fewer features. Withal, we noted in our reviews that whether yous desire to use a Core i5-12600K, Core i7-12700KF, or a Core i9-12900K, DDR5 doesn't bring massive performance gains over DDR4 in virtually tasks.