In these troubled times, choices have to be made when designing a new PC. According to Lexar, PC gamers prefer to have more storage space than lots of RAM. The company points out that small-capacity SSDs don’t sell as well as modest-capacity RAM kits. On the other hand, you need to have the budget to invest in a 32 GB DDR5 kit!
More storage, less RAM, the gamer’s choice according to Lexar!
512 GB SSDs are off to a bad start!
On a visit to Lexar, Digital Foundry learned from the company that gamers prefer to minimize the amount of RAM in favor of more storage space. On the one hand, this is understandable, since modern games are increasingly heavy on SSDs/hard disks, while RAM requirements are still “acceptable” in contrast. Indeed, it’s perfectly possible to play and enjoy games on a PC with 16 GB of memory. However, with a small SSD of less than 1 TB, you can’t install a lot of games simultaneously without having to juggle installs and uninstalls… Especially if you don’t have a fiber connection.
Increasingly heavy games!
In fact, the storage specialist indicated that 512 GB SSDs were having trouble selling, and understandably so. The Call of Duty series has seen its storage requirements explode… Even more so with HD textures. We soon find ourselves with games approaching or even exceeding 200 GB… That’s half the size of a 512 GB SSD, with a few GB missing for partitioning reasons, and that’s not counting the weight of the OS.
In contrast, if a game from the Call of Duty license requires a lot of storage space, memory requirements remain fairly measured, and the game is playable with a 16 GB kit. Death Strading 2: On the Beach requires 16 GB of RAM, as do Battlefield 6 and Crimson Desert, which was recently the subject of much discussion.
Prices have skyrocketed:
Finally, the reason why many machines were equipped with 32GB dual-channel kits before the shortage was that prices were affordable. You could get this type of configuration for less than €100. Now it’s unimaginable. Last March, compared with July 2025, 2×16 GB kits were 250% to 360% more expensive!
