2026 is really not a good year for people who want to build computers. Since the price of memory began to soar at the end of last year, the prices of DDR5 and SSD have been soaring. A set of 32GB DDR5-6000 memory alone will cost more than NT$10,000, and a 1TB NVMe SSD will cost at least NT$5,000. The two items combined will exceed NT$15,000. About a year ago, the combination of the same specifications was less than NT$6,000, which has led to the fact that few people want to build a computer this year.
The latest sales data from German retailer Mindfactory also directly confirms how sluggish the market buying sentiment is. CPU sales have fallen to the lowest point in 10 years. Foreign technology channels have emphasized that the speed of this decline is exaggerated.
CPU sales plummet to a ten-year low! German retailer data reveals DIY assembly market is cooling rapidly
The data was shared by TechEpiphany, a YouTube channel that has long tracked PC parts sales. TechEpiphany has been collecting weekly sales data from German retailer Mindfactory for the past ten years, covering categories such as CPUs, GPUs, and motherboards.
According to the data he released, desktop CPU sales have fallen to their lowest level ever. He himself said bluntly: “I have been tracking retail CPU sales for ten years, and I have never seen such a sharp decline.”
AMD accounted for approximately 89% of sales during this period, leaving Intel with less than 11%. Intel’s best-selling processor is the Core Ultra 7 265K, but only 10 were sold that week. Intel just officially launched Arrow Lake Refresh in mid-March, and the price is even lower than the previous generation. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is only $299, and the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is only $199. Logically speaking, it should stimulate a wave of replacements:
It is worth noting that although AMD’s sales share looks high, this does not mean that AMD’s sales are good, because Intel fell faster and AMD’s share was raised. And in Mindfactory’s sales rankings, many consumers still choose older processors like Ryzen 7 5700X and Ryzen 5 5500 because they are equipped with DDR4 memory and are much lower cost.
CPUs cannot be sold, and of course motherboards are also affected. According to another Mindfactory motherboard sales data shared by TechEpiphany, there is also a clear downward trend.
Judging from the data for week 12, a total of only 1,025 motherboards were sold that week, of which AMD accounted for 915 (89.27%) and Intel only 110 (10.73%).
AM5 sold best at 655 units, but most notably, the old AM4 platform still had 260 units, so roughly one out of every four units was AM4.
Intel’s latest LGA 1851 slot has only 50 slots, which is more than five times less than AM4. This means that in March 2026, there will still be a large number of consumers who would rather choose the old AM4 platform that has been launched for many years than switch to Intel’s new generation. In terms of the ratio of DDR4 to DDR5, DDR4 motherboards account for nearly 30%.
I really don’t know when this price increase will end…
Source: KOCPC Chinese