The iBuyPower RDY Scale B06 does not feel wildly expensive. That sentence should worry you more than it reassures you.
It is a sign of how ugly the memory market has gotten that a ready-to-ship gaming PC in this neighborhood stops looking like a luxury tax. The B06 is not a steal in the abstract. Measured against the current crunch, it is not a bad value either.
RAM is setting the price, not the case window
Reviewing hardware in a shortage means the old advice to wait for a better kit starts to sound like a bit. If you need a machine this month, you are not shopping in the market of two years ago. DRAM and NAND have been pulled toward data-center and AI demand. Consumer kits are priced like they know you noticed.
A prebuilt that bundles memory used to be the thing you paid extra to avoid building. Now the bundle can look almost sane next to a parts list that blows up on the RAM line. PC Gamer's review sits in that weather: the rig does not feel super expensive, and with the crisis in mind, the value is not too bad.
There is no spec sheet in the notes worth a holy war. No dollar figure to pretend is a scoop. The story is the price feeling, and the price feeling is a symptom. A couple of years ago the number on the box would have felt aggressive. Integrators were still fighting the reputation that they charged you for cable management and a window. In this market the number reads as expected.
Expected is not cheap. It is I have already accepted what DIMMs cost.
The people this actually hits are not enthusiasts with a drawer of spare modules. They are students, parents buying a first real PC, and anyone who would rather not become a part-time supply-chain analyst. When memory is the crisis, those buyers lose the DIY discount YouTube promised them. Integrators who already bought chips in bulk get to look reasonable by comparison.
Prebuilts used to be the sucker move
iBuyPower has lived in the U.S. ready-to-ship lane for years: configurators, holiday bundles, the RDY shelf of machines that leave the warehouse without a three-week wait. The Scale B06 is one of those boxes. DIY culture had a clean story for a long time. Buy the tower, skip the brand tax, win. That story assumed RAM and SSDs would keep getting cheaper in the background.
When they do not, the spreadsheet that used to embarrass a big-box prebuilt starts to embarrass the spreadsheet. You can still build. You just stop looking clever.
If the crunch holds, more of the market will shift toward RDY-style SKUs, not because they became noble, but because a complete system hides the ugliest line item inside one sticker. If the crunch breaks, this same box will look overpriced overnight. The product is a snapshot of a sick market. It will not make RAM plentiful. It will sit under a desk and run games while the rest of us argue about spot prices.
Sometimes the leftover constraint is the product. Xbox's leftover disc-to-digital conversion sells a feature Microsoft accidentally built in 2013. iBuyPower is selling a complete box in a year when the incomplete box looks worse. You are buying the moment either way.
Buy it this month, or wait on purpose
Buy the B06 if you need a PC that turns on this week and you have already made peace with what memory costs. Keep shopping if you still think the shortage blinks first. Set a date for that bet. A vibe is not a plan.
Watch contract chatter from the big suppliers, not influencer unboxings. If supply eases, the "not too bad" pitch expires. If it does not, expect more ready-to-ship machines sold as harm reduction. Used DIMMs will get uglier too. That is not a secret bargain lane. It is the same crunch with more risk.
Waiting has a cost in software too. A Witcher 3 expansion given to another studio makes people nervous because the thing they want might change in the queue. Warcraft 3's expansion built as a bridge into WoW is the opposite pitch: buy this so you are ready for that. The B06 has no sequel attached. It is a computer. If you need one, the honest review is that the memory crisis did the discounting for iBuyPower. That is a rotten reason for a PC to look reasonable, and it is still the reason.