. 7 min read.

Black Friday 2026 won't rescue the price of your PC

Ahead of Black Friday 2026, graphics cards are up as much as 25% and CPUs are next. RAM has only paused, and Micron says 2027 supply will be tighter still.

In early July, a GeForce RTX 5070 sold on Amazon France for €600 to €660. By late August, the same card cost €756 to €780, a quarter more in two months1. And on Monday, October 5, Intel was due to raise its processor prices by about 10%, its third increase in less than a year2.

With Black Friday seven weeks out, on November 27, rising PC prices are no longer just a memory story. Graphics cards and CPUs are climbing now, while RAM is merely catching its breath before a 2027 that Micron expects to be even tighter. Whatever discounts show up in late November will be taken off prices that have already gone up, and they won't get anyone back to what things cost in the spring.

A long line of bundled-up shoppers waits under a gray sky outside a Best Buy entrance, below its yellow sign, beside a mostly empty parking lot.
Black Friday morning 2019, outside a Best Buy in upstate New York. The line was there for discounts, not for prices back at summer levels (photo DanielPenfield / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Graphics cards gained a quarter over the summer

Hardware & Co, a French hardware site, tracked prices on Amazon France and found no tier left untouched. Between late June and late August, the RTX 5060 rose 18 to 24%, the RTX 5070 Ti 16 to 25%, and the RTX 5090 25%, going from roughly €4,000 to nearly €5,000. AMD's Radeon RX 9000 cards followed, up 6 to 33% depending on the model1. The climb didn't end with summer. As of October 3, the graphics card price index that the site GinjFo keeps across 120 products sold in France stood at 112.44, up 3.3% in a week and 4.6% in a month3.

The cause looks a lot like the one that sent RAM sticks through the roof. RTX 50 cards use GDDR7, a type of video memory4 made on the same production lines as data center memory, and each 2 GB module now costs card makers around $205. TSMC, the Taiwanese foundry that makes chips for both Nvidia and AMD, has also raised prices on its most advanced wafers5. AMD is passing the bill along, with an increase of about 10% planned for its Radeon cards and motherboard chipsets6 starting in the fourth quarter7.

CPUs join the climb

Processors had stayed out of it so far, and GinjFo still called them stable in late September. Its CPU index then rose 3.2% in a week, reaching 103.24 on October 23. Intel accounts for most of that. According to DigiTimes, a Taiwanese paper that covers the component supply chain, the company planned to raise PC processor prices about 10% on October 5, after a similar hike in the first quarter and another in July2. Lip-Bu Tan, its CEO since 2025, has chosen to rebuild margins rather than win back market share.

AMD left its Ryzen chips off its list of increases, at least for now7. They come out of the same TSMC fabs as its graphics cards, though, and nothing guarantees they'll stay out of it until Christmas.

RAM is pausing, not falling

GinjFo's RAM index slipped 3% over the past month3. That would be good news if the people who make memory weren't saying the exact opposite. On September 30, Micron, one of the big three memory makers alongside Samsung and SK hynix, reported its annual results. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said he expects memory supply and demand "to be much tighter in calendar 2027 and 2028 than they were in 2026," and the company has already signed agreements for the vast majority of its 2027 HBM8 supply "with significant price increases year over year"9.

The same document shows who is doing well out of the shortage. Micron sold its DRAM for nearly 20% more in a single quarter, on $39.8 billion in revenue, and the division that supplies PC and phone makers posted a 90% gross margin9. Nobody at Micron has much reason to hope things loosen up. Its new fabs won't change the picture for a while either, since the first one in Idaho won't produce until mid-2027 and the New York site not before 20309.

DigiTimes goes further, reporting that Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have already sold all of their 2027 DRAM and HBM capacity, which none of the three has confirmed. SK hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung, for his part, has warned that 2027 will likely be the worst year in the industry's history on the supply side10. So nothing has changed in the math I laid out in August, and September's dip looks like a landing on a staircase that keeps going up. SSDs, whose index hasn't moved, could even be next, since Micron sold its flash memory for about 30% more in one quarter9.

What a November 27 discount is worth

A sale price is taken off today's price, and that's where this year's Black Friday loses most of its appeal. An RTX 5070 listed at €780 and marked down 15% comes to €663, still more than it cost in early July. The useful habit is to check the crossed-out price against the product's price history rather than against yesterday's tag. Parts that lean hardest on memory, meaning RAM, SSDs, and graphics cards, have little room to drop while their production costs rise every quarter, so the real deals are more likely to come from products the increases haven't reached yet.

My laptop dates from June, bought thanks to a pricing error I will probably never see again, so I have nothing to decide this year. If I had a machine to replace, though, I wouldn't wait until November 27 for a part I needed, because everything points to it costing more in 2027. I also wouldn't buy one just because its price has a red line through it. This year, the best Black Friday deal is paying November prices for what you would have bought in 2027 anyway.

Notes

  1. Hardware & Co, graphics card prices on Amazon France from June to late August (in French), August 22, 2026. ↩ ↩2

  2. PCGamesN, "Intel reportedly hiking CPU prices again, pushing gaming PC costs even higher", September 8, 2026, citing DigiTimes. Intel did not comment. ↩ ↩2

  3. GinjFo, "Prix du hardware PC, les processeurs rejoignent les cartes graphiques à la hausse" (in French), October 5, 2026. The number of products tracked varies from one reading to the next, so these indexes are best read as a trend rather than to the cent. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. The memory soldered onto a graphics card, where the GPU keeps textures and the frames it is working on. The more there is, the happier high-resolution games and local AI models are. ↩

  5. Tom's Hardware, "In a troubling sign, Nvidia RTX 50 series prices jump up to 30% in South Korea", on GDDR7 module prices and TSMC's wafer increases. ↩ ↩2

  6. The motherboard chip that connects the processor to the ports, SSDs, and expansion cards. You don't pick it, it comes with the board, so its price increase ends up in every AMD motherboard. ↩

  7. PCWorld, "AMD GPU and motherboard prices could jump 10% soon, Ryzen may follow", September 21, 2026. ↩ ↩2

  8. Short for high bandwidth memory, stacked memory used in AI accelerators. It takes roughly three times as much silicon as the DDR5 in our PCs for the same capacity, so every gigabyte sold to a data center pulls several out of the consumer market. ↩

  9. Micron, "Fiscal Q4 2026 Earnings Call Prepared Remarks" (PDF), September 30, 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  10. TweakTown, "Memory capacity for all of 2027 has reportedly been booked and sold", citing DigiTimes and Reuters. ↩

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