PS5 Pro 2026: $899, 45% Faster GPU, No Disc Drive

There is a particular kind of hardware that only exists because a console generation ran too long. The mid-generation refresh is a tacit admission that the box you bought at launch was already behind the television you were about to buy. Sega did it with the 32X and the Sega CD, bolting expansions onto the Genesis until the thing looked like a stack of pizza boxes. Sony did it in 2016 with the PS4 Pro, codename 'Neo.' Microsoft did it in 2017 with the Xbox One X, the 'Project Scorpio' that promised true 4K and mostly delivered it. And on September 10, 2024, Mark Cerny — the man who designed Marble Madness in 1984 and has spent the four decades since apologizing for it with increasingly expensive silicon — walked us through the PlayStation 5 Pro.

At launch it cost $699.99. That was the whole story for about a week: a $700 console, $100 more than the disc-drive model it was supposed to sit above, and without a disc drive of its own. It was expensive. Then the world got worse. A tariff bump in August 2025 pushed it to $749.99. A DRAM shortage and a fresh round of tariffs pushed it, on April 2, 2026, to $899.99. Clip on the detachable Blu-ray drive you will need the moment you own a single physical game and you are looking at $979.98 before tax. In 2006, Sony asked $599 for a PlayStation 3 and the internet set itself on fire; Ken Kutaragi suggested you might want to work overtime to afford one. In 2026 they ask $899 for the optional console and most of us shrug, because everyone's prices went up at once and we have been anesthetized.

This is a comparison, so we are going to compare. The PS5 Pro against the base PS5 it upgrades, against the Xbox Series X it competes with, and against the gaming PC it quietly resembles on the spec sheet. We will do the numbers, the benchmarks Sony will and will not show you, the critic scores, five specific buyers and what each should actually do, a migration guide, and a verdict with a dollar figure attached. No fluff. The Machine does not do fluff.

What the PS5 Pro Actually Is

Strip the marketing and the PS5 Pro is a PlayStation 5. Same games, same operating system, same DualSense, same 8,500-plus backward-compatible PS4 titles, same eight-core Zen 2 CPU. What Sony changed sits in three places: the GPU, the memory subsystem, and one machine-learning trick that only this box can run. Everything else — the parts you touch, the library you own, the disc you cannot insert without buying an accessory — is unchanged. It is a graphics card upgrade wearing a console's clothes.

Cerny's pitch: a GPU, ray tracing, and three letters

On September 10, 2024, in a technical presentation streamed rather than staged, Cerny laid out three pillars: a GPU roughly 45% faster at rendering than the base PS5, advanced ray tracing that casts rays at 'double, and at times triple' the speed of the original, and PSSR — PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, an AI upscaler. He also announced, in the careful language of a man who knows exactly who is watching, 'a deeper collaboration with a focus on Machine Learning-based technology for graphics and gameplay' with AMD, later branded Project Amethyst. CNBC covered the reveal that same day, pegging the price at about $700 and framing it as a bet on the console business. Polygon's headline was blunter: 'PlayStation 5 Pro revealed, out Nov. 7 for $699.' Pre-orders opened September 26, 2024; the console shipped worldwide on November 7, 2024, exactly as promised.

What 'Pro' has never meant on a PlayStation: exclusives

Here is the lore point every launch review buried under frame-rate charts. Mid-generation refreshes used to come with games. The New Nintendo 3DS, released 2014 in Japan and 2015 in the West, shipped with genuinely exclusive software — Xenoblade Chronicles 3D would not run on the older handheld at all. The PS5 Pro has zero exclusive games and, by design, will never have one. Every 'PS5 Pro Enhanced' title also runs on a base PS5; it just runs prettier on the Pro. This is simultaneously a feature and a fatal marketing problem. The feature: nobody who owns the cheaper box gets locked out of anything. The problem: there is no must-have, no killer app, no single game you can point at and say 'that is why you buy the expensive one.' By February 2026, roughly a year and a quarter after launch, there were 107 Enhanced games, more than 70 of them using PSSR. That is a respectable count, and it is also an admission: the reason to own a Pro is that a growing subset of games look better, not that any game only exists here.

The disc-drive asterisk

The Pro ships digital-only. If you own physical media — and this is a retro-gaming site, so a healthy fraction of you own a great deal of it — you buy the detachable Ultra HD Blu-ray drive for $79.99 and clip it onto the side. It requires a one-time online activation the first time you pair it, which is its own small dystopia: a disc drive that phones home before it will read a disc you already paid for. You cannot cannibalize the built-in drive from an older disc PS5 and bolt it onto the Pro; the accessory is the only path. Factor it in. The honest sticker price for a physical-media buyer is not $899.99. It is $979.98.

Specs: Pro vs PS5 vs Series X

The Pro's entire argument lives in its GPU, so let us start there and then admit where the argument runs out. Across every meaningful graphics metric the Pro is a real step up from the base PS5, and for the first time since November 2020 it lets Sony claim the most powerful console on the market outright. But 'most powerful console' in 2026 is a lower bar than the price tag implies, and the parts Sony did not touch matter more than the marketing wants you to notice.

The GPU delta that actually matters

The compute-unit count jumps 67%, from 36 to 60. Raw FP32 throughput rises from 10.28 to 16.7 teraflops, a 62% increase on paper. Memory bandwidth — usually the real bottleneck for 4K rendering — climbs 29%, from 448 to 576 GB/s, and the Pro adds an extra 2 GB of DDR5 to handle background operating-system chores, freeing more of the 16 GB of GDDR6 for the game itself. Against the Xbox Series X (52 CUs, 12.155 TFLOPS, a split 560/336 GB/s memory bus), the Pro is clearly the stronger box. Just remember that teraflops are not frames per second; RDNA generation, clocks, and the ML hardware bolted on for PSSR do more work than the headline number suggests. The base PS5 is pure RDNA 2. The Pro borrows ray-tracing and machine-learning features from later AMD architectures, which is why its RT uplift (Sony's 'double, at times triple') outruns what the flat teraflops gap would predict.

The CPU nobody upgraded

The CPU did not change. Both consoles run the same eight-core AMD Zen 2. The Pro adds a 'High CPU Frequency Mode' that nudges the clock to roughly 3.85 GHz from 3.5, and it does so by shaving a sliver off the GPU's power budget — a trade, not a free lunch. The consequence is blunt: in CPU-bound games (heavy simulation, sprawling open worlds, high frame-rate targets), the Pro's advantage narrows toward nothing, because you cannot upscale your way out of a processor limit. This is exactly the wall the next console generation is being built to break, and it is the crux of the PC-versus-console argument we ran the numbers on. The SSD tells the same story. Both consoles read at 5.5 GB/s raw. Cerny's most quotable line about the Pro's I/O was that it is 'something like 100 microseconds faster than the original.' One hundred microseconds. For any human sitting on a couch, load times are identical; the Pro's 2 TB buys you capacity, not speed.

The full spec sheet

Here is the whole field side by side, including the console-appropriate equivalents of the things you would compare on an emulator — supported systems (backward compatibility), save-state behavior (suspend/resume), and netplay (online service and cross-play).

Nineteen rows, one conclusion: the Pro wins the GPU line and ties or loses almost everywhere else. The differences that would change your day — loading, the game library, the controller — are identical to a console costing $300 less.

The 2026 Price War

You cannot evaluate the PS5 Pro in 2026 without evaluating the reason it costs what it costs, because the reason is the whole story. This is not a console that got more expensive because Sony added features. It got more expensive because memory got expensive, tariffs landed, and every hardware maker in the room raised prices in lockstep. The Pro did not become a better deal or a worse one on April 2, 2026. It became a more expensive one for reasons that have nothing to do with the box.

How $699.99 became $899.99

The trajectory is a straight line up. Launch, November 7, 2024: $699.99. A tariff-driven bump on August 21, 2025: $749.99. Then, on April 2, 2026, a $150 jump to $899.99, announced the previous week and blamed on 'continued pressures in the global economic landscape' — corporate for a DRAM market up roughly 60% year over year, AI data centers hoovering up every memory chip on Earth, and a 25% tariff. The base consoles rose $100 each the same day: the disc PS5 to $649.99, the Digital Edition to $599.99. And in a detail that deserves its own footnote in the annals of shrinkflation, that Digital Edition had already been quietly cut from 1 TB to 825 GB back in September 2025 — less storage, then more money, in that order. The PS Portal climbed to $249.99. You can read the grim arithmetic laid out at Hypebeast's rundown of the global 2026 hike or in Vice's 'jumps to $900' report.

Xbox blinks: the August 1, 2026 hike

Sony did not do this alone, and that is the part that matters for a comparison. On June 25, 2026, Microsoft announced that Xbox Series X 1 TB models would rise $150 effective August 1, 2026 — the disc model to $799.99, the all-digital to $749.99 — and that the 2 TB Galaxy Black edition was being discontinued. The Series S went up $100 to $499.99. Microsoft's own explanation was unusually candid: 'console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027,' followed by the quiet part said out loud, that 'consoles are typically not sold at a profit, but instead for less than they cost to make.' You can read the full statement in Variety's coverage and WCCFtech's breakdown of the 2.5x claim. The timing is almost comic: as of the day this article publishes, July 31, 2026, the Series X is still $649.99. Tomorrow it is not. If you were ever going to cross-shop the cheaper console, today is the last day the math looks the way it looks.

The pricing and availability table

One warning before the table: the stale-source trap is everywhere. A large share of the 'PS5 Pro price 2026' pages still list $749.99, because they are evergreen articles that were never updated past the August 2025 numbers. If a source quotes the Pro at $749.99 in mid-2026, it is quoting a dead price. Here is the live one.

The single cleanest number to remember: the Pro costs exactly $300 more than a Digital base PS5, and exactly $250 more than a disc base PS5. Everything downstream is a referendum on whether that gap buys you enough.

Benchmarks: What the GPU Buys

Console benchmarking is a genre built on qualifiers, so let us set the ground rules. There is no synthetic score that captures a PS5 Pro, no 3DMark run you can quote. What we have are three classes of source: Sony's official figures (the spec sheet and Cerny's seminar), Digital Foundry-style frame-analysis of specific games, and the hands-on impressions of reviewers sitting where you sit — on a couch, some distance from a television. All three agree on the shape of the thing. They disagree, importantly, on whether you will notice.

Sony's numbers, and the asterisks

Sony's official claims are the 45% faster rendering, the 2-to-3x ray tracing, and PSSR reconstructing a 4K-class image from a lower internal resolution. The practical promise attached to those numbers is the most compelling part of the pitch: on a base PS5, demanding games force you to choose between a 30fps 'Fidelity' or 'Quality' mode and a 60fps 'Performance' mode that drops resolution and effects to hit the frame rate. The Pro's whole reason to exist is to collapse that choice — to give you something close to Fidelity-grade visuals at 60fps, with PSSR papering over the resolution deficit. When a game's Pro patch nails that, the upgrade feels real. The asterisk is that 'when it nails that' is doing heavy lifting; the result varies enormously by title and by how much effort the developer spent on the patch.

What the hands-on crowd measured

Digital Foundry's framing at launch was that the Pro does 'a much better job' than the PS4 Pro did back in 2016 — that is, a more honest, more consistent uplift than the last mid-gen refresh managed. That is praise, and it is also graded on a curve. The reviews that actually shaped the narrative were about perception, not percentages. TechRadar and The Verge both landed on the same uncomfortable truth: sitting ten feet from a mid-size 4K set, The Verge found the difference 'isn't tangible enough at that distance,' even while conceding that PSSR can 'make select games look amazing.' The same reviewer noted that on close inspection, blades of grass 'pop' in and out of existence — the upscaler's tell. GameSpot called some of the differences 'so minuscule.' The number that matters here is not a frame rate. It is a viewing distance. The Pro's advantages are most legible up close on a large, high-refresh panel and evaporate fastest across a living room.

The image-quality fight: PSSR vs native vs FSR

PSSR is a temporal machine-learning upscaler in the same family as NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR. It reconstructs a near-4K image from a lower internal resolution using a neural network that runs on dedicated silicon inside the Pro's GPU — silicon the base PS5 simply does not have. When PSSR is dialed in, it is genuinely impressive, and it is the single feature that justifies the word 'Pro.' The community consistently points to the same showcases — Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, Horizon Forbidden West — as the before-and-afters worth demonstrating. Where the base PS5 can only fall back on game-side FSR, which is a software technique that frequently looks like one, the Pro has a hardware answer. For the full head-to-head on where that lands game by game, we broke it down in our dedicated PS5 Pro vs base PS5 comparison. The short version:

• Native 4K/60: the Pro reaches it in more games than the base PS5, but rarely without PSSR doing part of the work.
• PSSR reconstruction: excellent in patched showcase titles; early builds shimmered and ghosted, which the March 2026 upgrade targeted directly.
• Game-side FSR (base PS5): available, software-only, and visibly softer — the gap is permanent because it is a hardware gap.
• Ray tracing: the Pro's 2-to-3x uplift is most visible in reflections and global illumination; on the base PS5, RT is often the first thing a Performance mode kills.

PSSR and the March 2026 Update

If PSSR is the reason to buy a Pro, then the March 2026 update is the reason the Pro is more buyable now than it was at launch — and also the reason the base PS5 is more permanently stranded than ever. This is the most consequential software event in the console's life so far, and it is worth understanding precisely.

What upgraded PSSR changed

In mid-March 2026, Sony began rolling out an upgraded PSSR, detailed in a PlayStation Blog post dated March 16, 2026. System software update 13.00, which arrived March 24, 2026, folded the enhanced PSSR into the platform alongside Unicode 17.0 emoji support and a redesigned Welcome hub. The upgrade is not a tweak; it is a fork of AMD's FSR 4, the direct product of Project Amethyst, the Sony-AMD machine-learning collaboration Cerny teased at the 2024 reveal. In plain terms, the two companies pooled their upscaling research, and the Pro inherited the result. The toggle lives at Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Enhance PSSR Image Quality. Resident Evil Requiem was the first title built to target it; FF7 Rebirth, Silent Hill f, Monster Hunter Wilds, Crimson Desert, Assassin's Creed Shadows, and Cyberpunk 2077 followed.

The Enhanced-games list, a year in

By February 2026, there were 107 PS5 Pro Enhanced games, more than 70 of them using PSSR, and the March rollout widened that pool further — we tracked the expansion in our piece on the upgraded PSSR reaching dozens more games. That is healthy momentum. It is also worth stating plainly what a growing Enhanced list means and does not mean. It means an expanding set of games look measurably better on the Pro. It does not mean any of them require the Pro. More than a year in, the value proposition remains 'a subset of your library looks nicer,' which is a real thing to pay for if you have the display to see it, and an abstract thing to pay for if you do not.

Why the base PS5 is locked out forever

This is the single most important sentence in the entire comparison, so read it twice: the base PS5 will never get PSSR, and the reason is architectural, not a software lock Sony could lift if it felt generous. PSSR runs on dedicated machine-learning hardware that exists only in the Pro's GPU. No neural silicon, no PSSR — not now, not in a future firmware, not ever. The practical implication is that the gap between the two consoles is not fixed; it widens over time. Every new game that leans harder on PSSR makes the Pro relatively better and the base PS5 relatively more dated. If you are weighing the two, you are not just comparing today's hardware. You are betting on how much of the generation's back half will be built around a feature only the expensive box can run.

What the Critics Said

The professional consensus on the PS5 Pro is unusually coherent, and it can be summarized in six words that appear, in various forms, across nearly every review: most powerful, not essential. Even the positive verdicts are conditional. Even the negative ones concede the power. Let us go to the tape, drawing from the Metacritic review roundup.

The 80 club

The top tier of scores clustered at 80. Engadget, TechRadar, Tom's Guide, and The Verge all landed there. Engadget called it 'the best option under $1,000' for players who want the most capable console money can buy — a compliment with a price ceiling built into it. TechRadar praised the fidelity while flagging the cost. The through-line even in the 80s is restraint: these are reviews that admire the engineering and hesitate at the register. Nobody in the 80 club called it a slam-dunk purchase; they called it an excellent product at a hard price.

The 70s and the lone 60

IGN scored it 7/10 and delivered the definitive line of the entire launch: the PS5 Pro 'isn't essential, but it is certainly nice to have,' while also conceding it is 'without question the most powerful' console available. Digital Trends, GamesRadar+, and GamesHub sat at 70. Ars Technica's take was that the money is 'better spent on games or PlayStation Plus' — the value argument in one clause. And at the bottom, Rolling Stone's 60 came with the bluntest advice of all: if you are on the fence, you 'might as well wait.' A 40-point spread between the high and low scores is not chaos; it is a chorus. The reviewers agree on what the console is. They disagree only on how much that is worth to you specifically.

One year later

The passage of time did not soften the verdict; it sharpened it. Kotaku's one-year retrospective concluded the Pro is for 'detail-obsessed gamers willing to spend $700' — and that was written before the price climbed to $899.99, which only tightens the filter. CNN Underscored's review and Tom's Guide's 2026 buyer's guide both land in the same place: a superb machine for a narrow, well-defined audience, and an easy skip for everyone else. When the most powerful console on the market is also the one every critic tells you to think twice about, the story is not the hardware. It is the buyer.

Five Buyers, Five Verdicts

A comparison that ends in a single verdict is lying, because there is no single buyer. The PS5 Pro is a spectacular purchase for one person and an act of self-harm for another, and the difference is entirely about display, library, and budget. Here are six real buyers — we could not stop at five — and what each should actually do.

1. The 4K/120 OLED owner with disposable income — BUY

This is the target, the person the entire console was designed and priced for. If you own a large, high-refresh 4K OLED, you have the exact display that renders PSSR and upgraded ray tracing legible rather than theoretical. You play the graphical showcases. The $300 premium is a rounding error against what you spent on the panel. For you, the Verge's 'not tangible at ten feet' warning does not apply, because you are not sitting ten feet from a mid-range LCD. Buy the Pro, clip on the disc drive if you collect, and never think about it again.

2. The 1080p or sub-43-inch player — DON'T

PSSR reconstructs toward a 4K target. On a 1080p panel, you are paying a $300 premium for pixels your display physically cannot show. The ray-tracing gains shrink at that resolution too. This is the single clearest 'no' in the entire comparison. Buy the base PS5, disc model, and spend the difference on the games you actually want to play.

3. The base-PS5 owner eyeing the upgrade — MOSTLY DON'T

You already own the library, the identical load times, and the same CPU. Upgrading buys you a GPU and PSSR for a subset of titles — nothing you own will run faster in any way you can measure with a stopwatch, only prettier in supported games. Unless you are a genuine fidelity obsessive with the display to justify it, hold. If you do jump, our Pro vs base breakdown covers exactly what changes and what does not.

4. The PS4 Pro or fresh-to-PS5 holdout — MAYBE

If you skipped this generation entirely and you are finally buying in during 2026, and you own a good 4K/120 set, the Pro is the version to own for the back half of the generation — it is the most future-proof against the widening PSSR gap. But run the $300 math honestly against a base disc PS5 plus a stack of the exclusives you missed. A PS5 and eight great games you have never played may beat a PS5 Pro and four.

5. The Xbox or PC cross-shopper — IT DEPENDS

Through today, July 31, 2026, the Series X is the value play at $649.99 with Game Pass and a built-in disc drive — but it loses that edge tomorrow when it hits $799.99, and it never gets Sony's first-party library. A roughly $900 gaming PC gets you into the same performance neighborhood as the Pro and plays everything, at the cost of assembly and driver maintenance; the full trade-off is in our PC-versus-console analysis. If Sony exclusives and plug-and-play matter most, Pro. If openness and a games buffet matter most, look elsewhere — today, before the Xbox hike.

6. The second-room streamer — SKIP ENTIRELY

If your plan is to play mostly in another room over the network, the Pro's GPU is wasted — streaming caps the fidelity long before the hardware does. A base PS5, or even the $249.99 PS Portal driving PS Remote Play, does the job for a fraction of the money. Spend the savings on games or a better router.

Pros and Cons by Console

The tables below compress everything above into the ledger you would actually consult at checkout. One row of context first: none of these consoles is a bad machine. The question is never quality; it is fit and price.

PS5 Pro

Base PS5 (Disc and Digital)

Xbox Series X and the PC spoiler

Migrating to the Pro

If you have decided you are the OLED buyer and you are moving from a base PS5 or a still-kicking PS4 Pro, the transfer is mercifully well-trodden. Sony's tooling is mature, your licenses live on your account rather than the hardware, and the whole thing can be done in an evening. Here is how to do it without losing a save or activating the wrong console.

Before you start: back everything up

Two things travel with your account and need no manual moving: your game licenses and, if you subscribe to PlayStation Plus, your cloud saves. Everything else — local saves not yet synced, screenshots, settings — benefits from a deliberate backup. Sync your saves to PS Plus cloud storage first, or copy them to a USB drive. If you keep games on an external USB SSD, that drive and its contents move to the Pro intact; just unplug and replug. Update both consoles to the latest system software before you begin, because the data-transfer tool refuses to run across mismatched firmware.

The three transfer methods

You have three ways to move your library, in descending order of speed. First and fastest: a direct console-to-console transfer over a wired LAN cable, which shuttles games, saves, settings, and users in one pass. Second: the same transfer over Wi-Fi, slower but cable-free. Third, and often simplest if you have one: an external USB SSD you already game from, which the Pro adopts without re-downloading a byte. Whichever you choose, the menu paths are short.

Both consoles updated and on the same network:
Pro: Settings > System > System Software > Data Transfer > Continue
(Use a wired LAN cable between the two consoles for the fastest transfer.)

After first boot on the Pro:
Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Enhance PSSR Image Quality > On
Settings > Users and Accounts > Other > Console Sharing and Offline Play > Enable

The disc-drive and first-boot gotchas

The migration itself is smooth; two things trip people up. First, the disc drive. If you are coming from a disc PS5, you cannot move that built-in drive to the Pro — you must buy the $79.99 detachable unit and let it complete its one-time online activation before it will read anything. Budget for it and expect the handshake. Second, set the Pro as your primary console (the Console Sharing toggle above) and, if you are selling the old machine, deactivate it first so you do not burn your primary-console slot. Follow it with the standard housekeeping below.

1. Sync saves to PS Plus cloud or copy them to USB.
2. Update both consoles to the latest system software.
3. Run Data Transfer over a wired LAN cable (fastest) or Wi-Fi.
4. Attach the detachable UHD Blu-ray drive and let it activate online.
5. Set the Pro as your primary console; deactivate the old one if selling.
6. Toggle Enhance PSSR Image Quality on and confirm your TV is in 4K/120 mode.
7. If the Pro stutters or a game refuses to launch on first boot, clear the cache and rebuild the database in Safe Mode before you panic.

The Verdict

The PS5 Pro is, per IGN, 'without question the most powerful' console you can buy, and, per the same review, 'not essential.' Both statements are true at the same time, and holding both in your head is the entire skill of buying one correctly. This is not a bad machine. It is a narrow one, sold at a wide price, into the worst hardware-pricing environment in a decade.

The $300 rule

Every purchase decision here reduces to one comparison: the Pro costs exactly $300 more than a Digital base PS5. What does $300 buy? Roughly 45% more GPU, PSSR, a permanent and widening upscaling advantage, a bigger SSD, and Wi-Fi 7. It also, alternatively, buys four new games, or well over a year of PlayStation Plus Extra, or most of a disc drive plus a Premium subscription. If you own a 4K/120 OLED and you play the showcase titles, the $300 lands on the right side of the ledger. If you sit ten feet from a 55-inch mid-range set, The Verge already told you the answer: not tangible. If you are on 1080p, the purchase is indefensible, full stop.

The data-backed recommendation

The numbers point one direction. Metacritic tops out at 80 and bottoms out at 60. IGN gives it a 7. The critical consensus is 'most powerful, not essential, wait if unsure.' So: buy the PS5 Pro only if all three of these are true — you own a 4K OLED (ideally 120Hz), you actually play graphically ambitious games, and $900-plus-drive does not sting. Miss any one of those and the base PS5 disc model at $649.99 is the smarter machine, with the difference redirected to a library you will finish. That is not a hedge; it is what the review scores, the price ladder, and the viewing-distance data all say when you line them up.

What The Machine would buy

In this specific, ugly market — $899.99 for the Pro, $649.99 for a disc PS5 that plays every identical game at every identical load time, an Xbox going up tomorrow, and Microsoft on record predicting memory prices will double again by fall 2027 — the rational purchase is the base disc PS5 and a pile of games. In 2006 we mocked Sony for a $599 console. In 2026 the disc drive alone costs more than a launch NES cartridge, adjusted or not, and we call the $899 box the reasonable flagship. But rational and want are different verbs. If you already know you are the OLED person, you were never going to buy the base model, you have read this far only to be told yes, so: yes. Go clip the drive on. Everyone else — wait, buy the cheaper box, and check back when the DRAM market remembers how supply and demand are supposed to work.