About the data

712 parts across 10 categories, each with a street price recorded on 2026-09-03. Price history is kept for the three categories that actually move — video card, CPU, memory — because cases, coolers, fans and monitors barely do, and pricing every SKU daily would cost effort for no insight.

Prices are street estimates, not quotes. A number with no date on it is worse than no number at all, which is why the date travels with every figure, including the ones you export. Parts added since the snapshot carry their own date and source, and their pages say so, and the test suite refuses any price that resolves to neither.

• Tom's Hardware GPU price indexGraphics card street prices and MSRPs
• Tom's Hardware RAM price indexDDR4 and DDR5 kit prices by capacity
• NAND / SSD pricing coverageNVMe and SATA drive prices
• TrackaLacker processor listingsDesktop CPU street prices
• PassMark CPU value chartCurrent retail prices of CPUs on sale new, as the chart listed them on the day read
• Newegg listing, read by handA part's price as newegg.com listed it, sold and shipped by Newegg, on the date given
• Product listingPrebuilt system prices, read from the maker's or retailer's own page on the date given

No retailer is scraped. The seed history holds only defensible points: real launch MSRPs dated to launch, real street prices dated to the snapshot, and one pre-shortage memory reference that is labelled a category-level estimate wherever it appears.

Prebuilt systems are priced from their own listing, read by hand on the date each page prints. A listing that showed no price has none here. Inside a prebuilt, a part the maker names resolves to the catalog and is priced from it; a part the maker does not name — “brand varies”, or the maker's own board — is recorded in the listing's words and priced at nothing, never as the nearest thing we happen to carry. A video card named only by its silicon is priced at that chipset's index, and says so.

• DDR5 has roughly quadrupled since late 2025 — a 32 GB kit was about $90 and is now about $400. The ongoing DRAM shortage is the cause.
• NVMe SSDs have roughly doubled: 2 TB drives moved from $130-150 to $290-400.
• Most graphics cards sell well above MSRP. An RTX 5090 lists at $1,999 and sells near $5,200.
• CPUs are the exception — they have stayed close to launch pricing, so they are unusually good value right now relative to everything else.

These are unusual and they are real. They are not typos in the catalog.

A chipset ships as several board-partner cards — 26 chipsets become 237 cards here — whose prices differ by hundreds of dollars for identical silicon. Charting any one card misrepresents the chipset; charting all of them is unreadable. So each chipset gets an index: per capture date, the mean of the cards priced within 15% of that date's cheapest card.

The rule anchors on the cheapest card rather than the average on purpose. An average is dragged upward by exactly the halo models the rule exists to exclude, so an average-based threshold would quietly let them back in. Every GPU page lists its siblings and says which ones the index counts.

Card-level prices are modelled from the chipset's street price by the cooler tier of each card, not individually verified. Treat the index as a trend and a single card's figure as an estimate.

Measured: the Compare tab's Benchmarks card prints a processor's or a card's Cycles render score from Blender Open Data (CC0): the median over every public run on Blender 4.5.0, read from the source once a day, for devices with at least 10 runs — a device with fewer shows no score. It is render throughput, a productivity measure and not a gaming figure, and auto build's productivity weighting ranks by it. Gaming still ranks by a hand-set index that is not printed anywhere.

Modelled: the builder's frame-rate estimate is a two-variable model — a relative index for the video card and one for the processor, with a resolution cost applied. It is labelled indicative wherever it is printed, and it should be read as “which of these two builds is faster”, never as “how many frames you will get”. It will be replaced when a gaming benchmark source is licensed.

Sockets, memory type and slot count, video-card length against the case, cooler height and radiator size, power draw against the supply, form factors, M.2 and SATA counts, and more — every rule runs on every change, and the same rules run speculatively over the whole catalog so a part that cannot fit is marked before you pick it.

Four rules exist that never fire today: memory height against cooler clearance, radiator thickness against the case, a front USB-C port against the board's header, and M.2 slots switching off SATA ports. The fields they read are unset on every part, because those are per-model facts that need a manufacturer spec sheet, and this catalog does not guess at facts. They will start firing as the fields are filled in from cited sheets.

Product pages link to each shop's own search — Newegg, Amazon, Best Buy, B&H, Micro Center — and never show a retailer beside a price. A vendor name next to a price and a stock state is a factual claim, and nothing here has a retailer feed to back one. The shop answers that question live; this site does not pretend to. The Amazon link carries the site's affiliate tag and says so beside it; the Disclosure page has the rules, and commission never touches the order the shops are listed in.

For the same reason there is no product photography: manufacturer and retailer images are copyrighted, so pages draw a generated placeholder that says so rather than borrowing a photo.