The rig bill index
Playing games keeps gettingmore expensive
A 1440p gaming PC, past 12 months
The same build went from $1,513 to $1,955. You did not get a better PC. You got the same one, later.
mid-2025 → now
Curated index. Baseline = mid-2025 street low, current = July 2026 street price, sourced from the trackers linked below. Last updated July 2026.
Every line only goes up
Why
AI ate the memory. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron shifted wafer capacity to high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators, so DRAM and NAND for the rest of us went scarce. A 32 GB DDR5 kit that was around $90 in mid-2025 now runs about $398. GPUs, motherboards and SSDs all carry the same tax. Analysts do not expect real relief before 2028.
The Walter hardware index
$0
Every line above climbs. This one does not move, and never will. Walter runs the games on its own hardware and streams them to the screen you already own.
flat. forever.