During a media tour of Lexar headquarters in China, Digital Foundry interviewed Grace Su, General Manager of Lexar Europe, who introduced the configurations that players currently really value in installed machine purchases, and where they are willing to make concessions.
She said that despite the current high prices of DRAM and NAND flash memory, consumers are relatively more willing to "make do" with memory capacity, but the requirements for solid-state drive capacity are significantly higher, and the sales of SSDs with a capacity of less than 512 GB are not performing well.
From the perspective of the installation process, memory and SSD are both indispensable basic configurations. Players with limited budgets often need to weigh between "larger memory capacity" and "larger solid-state drive space." Lexar's internal sales data shows that most gamers would rather choose a memory module with a smaller capacity than compromise on system disk and game disk space. Furthermore, some users are even willing to return to mechanical hard disks (HDDs) and do not intend to purchase SSDs with capacities below 512 GB. According to Lexar, this trend is directly related to the size of contemporary AAA games, which often reach hundreds of GB. The impact of insufficient storage space on the experience is far greater than moderately compressed memory capacity.
At the same time, high memory prices are pushing up the installation and upgrade thresholds, forcing PC players who want a smooth gaming experience on the Windows 11 platform to invest more budget. The industry currently views 16 GB as the "starting" memory configuration for Windows 11 systems, but some gaming scenarios and multitasking workloads have begun to push players towards 32 GB packages, and the prices of such products have increased significantly from a year ago. According to previous tracking data on the DDR4 spot market, the spot price of a single 16 Gb DDR4 chip has increased by approximately 2,200% in the past year, with only a slight correction of approximately 5% in March this year. The report believes that without a more substantial price drop, it will be difficult for players to truly "breathe a sigh of relief" on their memory budgets in the short term.
Looking forward to the market outlook, there is still great uncertainty in the price trend of the storage and memory fields. Although the market once expected a new round of adjustments to bring about price easing, the industry expects that the "tight balance" pattern will continue as the demand for AI computing power is generally optimistic and related applications continue to push up DRAM and NAND purchases. In such an environment, gamers are likely to continue with their current prioritization when setting up their systems - sticking to the bottom line of 512 GB or larger SSDs while finding an acceptable compromise between memory capacity and budget.