[bhelkey]

I linked both prebuilt and do it yourself builds. Neither resulted in a comparable machine to the PS5 for $600.

Again, I think you are missing how much the price of components has increased.

16GB of DDR5 alone costs approximately $200 [1]. I challenge you to find a new case, motherboard, NVMe SSD, and PSU for the remaining $100 in the budget after $200 for ram and after your assumed $300 for a GPU.

[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#b=ddr5&Z=16384001,...

[somenameforme]

Your comment made me go start deep diving US prices, and yeah there's something really odd. I've been abroad for sometime now in Asia, but that doesn't typically matter in these sort of discussions because the market's fairly efficient. But right now go check out prices on Alibaba for DDR5 [1] and compare that to what US retailers are charging. Those prices on Alibaba are not only very real (as I can order local stuff with ballparks around those figures), but it's also where many retailers in the US are going to be sourcing their hardware from.

So I don't really understand what's happening. Prices shouldn't be this high. That should be opening the door to huge arbs even for a drop-shipping middle man. Tariffs, shipping, something else?

[1] - https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/ddr5-ram.html