I feel we have a RAM price surge every four years. The excuses change, but it's always when we see a generation switch to the next gen of DDR. Which makes me believe it's not AI, or graphics cards, or crypto, or gaming, or one of the billion other conceivable reasons, but price-gouging when new standards emerge and production capacity is still limited. Which would be much harder to justify than 'the AI/Crypto/Gaming folks (who no-one likes) are sweeping the market...'
To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same device.
A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought
some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid
you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it
was back in 2023 or so, give or take.
I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700.
I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade.
I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440.
For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580 GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues.
Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not.
I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).
>For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the best one.
you should upgrade to a used or new 12900k with DDR4 since its still cheaper than dd5 even if it is up. then get a used 3080ti with 12gb. youll be able to do proper h.265 decode/encode with that for up to 4k (unfortuantly not 8k but hey no one really has that yet)
Do yourself a favor and order $25 Xeon E3-1231 v3/E3-1241 v3 from China. Those work in all desktop motherboards. Used DDR3 ram is also so cheap you can bump to 32GB for another $20.
easy cheap upgrades. CPU will be noticeable straight away, ram only if you are running out.
I'm glad I kept my ageing Dell Studio XPS 7100. I need to stock up on some Dell Precision towers from the surplus in case my Studio XPS 7100 breaks. This AI bubble needs to burst soon.
When RAM gets so expensive that even Samsung won’t buy Samsung from Samsung, you know the market has officially entered comic mode. At this rate their next quarterly report is just going to be one division sending the other an IOU.
Apple is going to be even more profitable in the consumer space because of RAM prices ? I feel like they are the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard, have good prices locked in enough in advance and suppliers not willing to antagonize such a big customer by backing out of a deal.
Why bother selling to regular consumers at all then? One or two big companies can have everything, and the rest of us can have nothing. And we will like it.
Based on my time working for Samsung this does not surprise me. The silos within fight against one another more than they ever bother to compete with anyone else
Somebody had PC Part Picker [1] on a different thread. Found it kind of helpful. 3x, 3.5x, and 4x is relatively common across most memory types. DDR4-3200 2x32GB is one of the few that appears to have flattened slightly at 2.5x, although most DDR4-3200 is not as severe as other DDR4 or DDR5. None of the other lines appear to have flattened significantly yet.
"The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu and that they were transitory.
It is absolutely the worst time to be a gamer. First it was the GPU prices that went up and NVIDIA started to focus on their enterprise cards more and more RAM prices. I don’t think I’ve seen the price of computer components go up so much.
I had planned to build a new workstation this fall, all the parts were in the list. but seeing the ram go from 300€ (96 GB) to 820€, in-stock for 999€, in under a month made me decide that i will continue using that laptop from 2019 for maybe another 1.5 years.
It's a ridiculous situation and these companies, whoever they are, should be somewhat ashamed of themselves for the situation they're putting us in.
That goes specially for those MF at OpenAI who apparently grabbed 40% of the worldwide DRAM production, as well as those sold in stores.
I really wanted to build a new PC this year, which is obviously not happening anymore. But I do have 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from my laptop that I'm not using, after I upgraded to 64GB a while back. Now I wonder if I can build a tiny PC around those? Does anyone make motherboards that support DDR5 laptop memory?
Minisforum offer a Mini-ITX board with a 16-core Zen4 AMD CPU soldered on for under $400. The AM5 socket version of that same CPU alone is over 500.
It uses SO-DIMM DDR5 so might be an interesting option in your case.
(Yes, it is a mobile CPU but it has the same amounts of L2/L3 Cache as the AM5 chip, just clocked 300MHz slower)
I bought 64 GB DDR4 RAM for $189 in 2022. The exact same memory is now almost $600 on Amazon. How can this not impact PC sales and the sale of other electronics?
This is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.
This is to be expected from any large corporation. In my experience, this sort of infighting leads to low morale and wastes a significant amount of energy that could be directed somewhere far more productive.
45 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] threadSo much for open markets, somebody must check their books and manufacturing schedules.
https://goomics.net/62
A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or take.
I want my money back, OpenAI!
I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade.
I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440.
For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.
Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not.
I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).
I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the best one.
easy cheap upgrades. CPU will be noticeable straight away, ram only if you are running out.
Pricing.
96GB (2x48) DDR5 5x00 £260 today £1050
128GB (4x32 ) DDR5 5x00 £350 today £1500
Wut?
Edit: formatting
Now each stick is over 180$.
[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
It's a ridiculous situation and these companies, whoever they are, should be somewhat ashamed of themselves for the situation they're putting us in.
That goes specially for those MF at OpenAI who apparently grabbed 40% of the worldwide DRAM production, as well as those sold in stores.
https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-motherboard