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32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building
- nirui 4mo agoThe most disappointing part is not the price alone, it's that despite the price increase, the quality of the modules are still the same or even worsened.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoHonestly that seems slightly down even if it’s still ridiculous. The ram I bought for $100 a year ago was $500 a couple of months ago. Could just be the particular sticks I got though
- john_strinlai 4mo ago$375 is the cheapest kit, and the price is using a promo code "Price tracking courtesy of PCPartPicker now reveals the cheapest 32GB DDR5 RAM you can buy is $375. Specifically, four XPOWER kits from Silicon Power will set you back $374.97 thanks to a promo code."
- Forgeties79 4mo agothat’s what I get for not clicking through TFA
- moomoo11 4mo agoi have 128gb ddr4 from a few years ago. i think i paid like 300-400 for it. its paired to a 5950x so im sure it will be fine for a few more years
- swiftcoder 4mo agoOne would think the CPU prices would drop as RAM crunches PC sales, but apparently not
- axegon_ 4mo ago"The costs are negligible and justified when compared to all the benefits. If you look at the performance gains, the overall cost has in fact been reduced." - Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
- Scene_Cast2 4mo agoThis is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.2x32768 https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.
- fullstop 4mo agoI regret not building the PC when I was looking at it. It's not a money thing, at the end of the day, but I can't bring myself to do it. I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time. My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)
- chrismorgan 4mo agoSimilar situation—just as I was about to buy, an emergency occurred, and when I came back two months later my ₹1,00,000 build was ₹1,20,000, and I felt I couldn’t quite justify it any more. And after all, my laptop had stabilised and no longer seemed to be dying like it had been a year earlier. Well, now my build would be ₹1,75,000 and feeling even less justified.
- ajam1507 4mo agoPre-built PCs are the way to get a deal right now. The price of individual components is much more expensive than buying something from Micro Center or one of the Chinese integrators.
- snkline 4mo agoThe memory in the PC I put together early last year is now worth about three times the total cost of all the parts I used to build the thing. It is absolutely crazy.
- expedition32 4mo agoYou could get a 990pro 2 terabyte Samsung SSD for €150 just last year. Memory had become a commodity product.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- brnaftr361 4mo agoGN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8
- babypuncher 4mo agoWho needs an economy built on consumer spending when a handful of massive tech companies can just keep passing around the same trillion dollar check like a hot potato?
- zargon 4mo agoConsumer oriented parts businesses are going to go out of business from this. Motherboards, cases, coolers, power supplies, fans, etc. At this point it's a matter of how many. Selection and competition will be permanently reduced, as I don't see these types of companies coming back any time soon.
- mcmcmc 4mo agoThe knee jerk gamer reaction that everything will be pushed to cloud gaming I think is unrealistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see higher end workstations or gaming PCs move to a leasing model or something like carrier subsidized smartphones, where you lock into a contract with an upgrade cycle
- 4mo ago
- Keyframe 4mo agoCan we just go back to pre-AI world?
- okokwhatever 4mo agoCan we just go back to pre-{anything-here} world?
- z2 4mo agoThis is textbook negative externalities, of the AI buildout on everyone who isn't using RAM/GPUs for AI, of the use of electricity and water on anyone who isn't using it for AI. The cynic in me thinks this will go down in history alongside asbestos, leaded gasoline/paint, and the opioid crisis.
- WarmWash 4mo agoPeople want this, the demand is there. Like clockwork, people naturally want to have their cake and to eat it too, so there will be the incessant complaining about the externalities. Half the people lack the brainpower to see the good and bad are intrinsically linked, and the other half just like complaining. But at least for now, both halves aren't pulling back (in fact it's increasing), and money, not complaining, steers the ship.
- lionkor 4mo ago> People want this, the demand is there. It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun. That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.
- deltoidmaximus 4mo agoAMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.
- dijit 4mo agoShame I have 2TiB of ECC DDR4 lying around :( Would be nice to be able to own property.
- varispeed 4mo agoPeople used to mock "you'll own nothing" as conspiracy theory.
- stodor89 4mo agoYoo, what about the "and be happy" part???
- Hamuko 4mo agoYou can probably get a mansion in France for that.
- arjie 4mo agoBetter to get rid of that stuff now unless it’s fast. You can get used 2666 DDR4 for about $200/64 GiB stick.
- onli 4mo agoNice, I missed that. The 5700X3D has been the smarter pick back then, it fits to the current latent user hostility of AMD to focus on the more expensive processor.
- silon42 4mo agoThey need to sell something. I bet sales of DDR5 related stuff are down.
- usui 4mo agoI looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!
- qingcharles 4mo agoI was picking up DDR3 16GB sticks for $5/piece on eBay last year. The world has gone mad.
- Hamuko 4mo agoTo be fair, DDR3 is still kinda cheap. It's really only DDR4 and DDR5 that are massively in demand. DDR3 is a bit too old for it to be in high demand by consumers.
- giantrobot 4mo agoWhile DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.
- qingcharles 4mo agoI wanted to buy another one and they are like $90 now :(
- mysteria 4mo agoPersonally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.
- Cyfrit 4mo agoUnbelievably, even DDR3 isn't spared. Our suppliers have been quoting us much higher prices for DDR3 for months now, and we're experiencing persistent stock shortages. Fabs are abandoning legacy nodes to prioritize AI capacity, making it rough even for maintaining old gear.
- thijson 4mo agoPrice should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.
- nemomarx 4mo agoSo far haven't we seen the opposite? Consumer focused ram production shutting down to make more volume for server dimms or etc?
- fluoridation 4mo agoThe bottleneck isn't the sticks, it's the chips. The chips are the same for consumer and server applications. What's been happening is that big companies have bought nearly all the wafer capacity for the next year or so, and perhaps some of that capacity has also been redirected from DDR5 to LPDDR5. If a stick manufacturer drops out of the consumer market that kinda doesn't matter, because manufacturing sticks is relatively low tech compared to manufacturing the memory chips. You can compare it to manufacturing video cards vs. manufacturing GPUs (as in the actual processing elements).
- marcosdumay 4mo agoThe fabs are the same and are the actual bottleneck. The chips are different for CPUs and GPUs.
- layer8 4mo agoWhat do you mean? RAM manufacturers shifting their capacities to server RAM and HBM is exactly what’s happening.
- mgfist 4mo agoA fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build. It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
- 4mo ago
- swiftcoder 4mo agoI bought 64GB of DDR4 in December of '24. Best timing-the-market of my life.
- tayo42 4mo agoTake your ram budget, buy micron stock, wait a few days, sell it and buy ram lol
- alecsm 4mo agoSame thing with storage. I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
- hstaab 4mo agoSettle for a modest 2TB and spend the rest on ice cream during your rides.
- dawnerd 4mo agoEven spinning metal has gone through the roof even on refurb and server pulls.
- turpentine 4mo agoI have to wonder if some online stores have been drip selling stock, trying to sell at the top of the market. A few extra $k on thousands of units from a day-to-day price change is probably tempting for small pc part businesses.
- amarcheschi 4mo agogetting a road bike is understated, at least where i live it is so nice to roam around outisde cities with just a few cars around
- ajsnigrutin 4mo ago"back in my time", a dialup and 32 megs(!) of ram was enough for most stuff, including internet browsing. I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc. Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore. edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Fnoord 4mo ago250 EUR (that is with VAT for 2x16 GB DDR4 [1] seems like a fair price. [1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lpx-cmk32gx4m2e3200c16.html https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- KronisLV 4mo agoCrazy, the other day I looked in my local store order history and say that I bought G.SKILL RipJaws V F4-3600C18D-32GVK, a DDR4 32 GB 3600 MHz kit of two sticks. I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation. Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).
- functionmouse 4mo agoI'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.
- stuxnet79 4mo agoSome might call this a boomer build but the 4790k is an absolute beast of a CPU and still holds up.
- arjie 4mo agoI recently booted up an old 4790k system and it was fine on Linux but on Windows it would nag me to update but apparently the CPU is too old for new Windows. I ended up giving it away on the Internet to whomever could pick up but afterwards it ended up with one of those reseller chaps. Ah well, I wish it had made to some kid somewhere.
- functionmouse 4mo agoThat makes sense. I'm on Windows 10 LTSC so I don't get nags and scare screens from Microsoft as much as a regular machine might.
- stuxnet79 4mo ago> Windows it would nag me to update but apparently the CPU is too old for new Windows When I was trying to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 I got the same warning. It is the reason why I'm now happily running Xubuntu on the same machine. I did end up installing a Windows 11 VM (VirtualBox) which works perfectly fine running as a guest under Xubuntu on a 4790k (screw you Microsoft). But I otherwise never want go back to Windows as a daily driver. The enshittification just got too much for me.
- antonyt 4mo agoI got a 4700k in 2013 for 200 bucks from Microcenter. The thing has been continuously in service ever since. It's my "homelab" box now.
- 4mo ago
- api 4mo agoThis is insane. Didn’t know how bad it got. I bought a mini PC a few years ago with 64 gigs in it for a home VM server for like $600 total. Looks like I’m keeping it a while. Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.
- sixothree 4mo ago[dead]
- Hamuko 4mo agoIt was just yesterday that SK Hynix announced to double their capacity over the next five years. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-to-double-wafer-capacity-to-ease-memory-chip-crunch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-...
- whizzter 4mo agoMy bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
- throwaway613746 4mo ago[dead]
- varispeed 4mo ago> that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.
- fluoridation 4mo agoHonestly, that's the output I get from non-local models, anyway. If I'm going to get plausible nonsense either way, I may as well run it on my own hardware.
- cogman10 4mo agoThey are actually quite a bit better than you might think. Qwen3.6 27B is pretty capable at coding. For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model. After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.
- Matticus_Rex 4mo agoI'm sure there are things local models are good enough at in non-coding work, but for anything complex I do not find this to be the case. I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoCrazy... I hope this is temporary. If this is the new normal, we're all going to be priced out of computers eventually.
- snarfy 4mo agoI am counting my blessings after updating my and my wife's gaming PCs right before all of this happened.
- SirFatty 4mo agoNot just AI, tariffs also affect price.
- tonyrice 4mo agoAt one point I remember DDR2 ECC coating like $150-$180 Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.
- doubled112 4mo agoEverything is relative. I thought 128MB of SDRAM was a good deal at $100. I also thought $479 for 32GB of DDR4 was nuts back in 2016/2017.
- HumblyTossed 4mo agoWhile back I recalled I had 16GB of DDR4 somewhere. I went and found it in an old bin box. It's now in my safe in case I need it for a machine. This is the stupidest freaking timeline...
- flr03 4mo agoJust looked for my order receipt out of curiosity, this was in Jan 23: £160 for Kingston FURY Renegade 32GB (16GB x 2) 6000MT/s DDR5 CL32 DIMM Silver
- icedchai 4mo agoPretty insane. I built a Framework Desktop PC back in November. The motherboard (with 128G DDR5 RAM) was $1800. Now it's $2859. Almost 60% increase in 6 months.
- nerdjon 4mo agoI am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot. I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now. The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
- keyringlight 4mo agoThe way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.
- name_concept 4mo agoTo me, this is just one more thing that makes the current times we live in "not fun".
- flobosg 4mo ago8G ought to be enough for anybody.
- chadgpt3 4mo agoThis but unironically. As long as "anybody" means "any developer dogfooding their own program"
- randusername 4mo agoI want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this. Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news? I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
- ambicapter 4mo agoMemory makers are reluctant to increase fabrication (high cost of capital and boom/bust cycle leads to bankruptcies being common in the industry), and the memory required for AI (HBM) requires more of the production inputs than other types of RAM, thus squeezing regular DDR RAM even more. Long-form article describing this in more detail: https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone
- pjc50 4mo agoSupply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer-buyers-scramble-imports-factory-slots--reeii-2026-05-11/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer... The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.
- simonsarris 4mo ago> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
- CheeseOnFries 4mo agoI've taken advantage of this.. Over the last 6 months I actually made money on my old PC parts inventory, but don't plan on buying any new hardware anytime soon.
- lionkor 4mo agoI built a little home server last year, and only put 32 of the total 64 GB I wanted. The rationale was that RAM is cheap, and I could spend that month's fun budget on a 8TB harddrive instead. Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.
- gvalkov 4mo agoThe squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on. Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
- zozbot234 4mo agoIf you don't need the full memory bandwidth of DDR5 for any particular application area, the best solution is probably just to add flash storage for mostly read-only data and Intel Optane (still sold in the secondary market at around $1/GB) for write-heavy scratchpad space. The latter gives you around DDR3ish performance at a higher power draw than DRAM or modern flash, but its wearout-resistance and lower latency compared to flash still matters. > Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.
- 9x39 4mo agoThat’s about right, sadly. We were buying servers with 1TB DDR5 standard, no longer. Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.
- ocdtrekkie 4mo agoI got quoted $4K, $6K, and $8K for the same enterprise SSD part in three different quotes within about a week. (I normally expect this part to be $1.5-2.5K.) In one case, a storage array with two SSDs in it cost approximately the same as buying those two SSDs standalone. When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week. Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.
- 4mo ago
- VikingCoder 4mo ago[dead]
- butz 4mo agoTime to migrate all those electron "native" apps to actual native code. I bet with some decent optimizations 4GB will be more than enough for casual user, and still with some free memory to spare.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hinata08 4mo agoit's more than casual users used to have, and most still do the same activities even decades after 2GB were enough weather forecast wasn't more rainy on a 2005 windows PC or an early smartphone in 2G to save battery FHD streaming has worked for decades now The plot of animes was still enjoyable on DVD Progress is important, but some companies don't realise how customers don't need it when it's twice their pay
- boredinstapanda 4mo agoMan, I remember my first 8MB cost over $400.
- elric 4mo agoHow much of is this is actually due to the AI hype cycle, and what's the impact of the global energy clusterfuck that is the Strait of Hormuz?
- tjwebbnorfolk 4mo agoDRAM prices were in the stratosphere late last year, pre-dating the Iran war by 4+ months.
- jaynetics 4mo agoYeah, the prices are actually down a few pp compared to record highs recorded before the war. The war might even exert some downward pressure. It increased the cost of living, thus reducing demand for comparative luxuries like new devices. Laptop and smartphone markets are contracting heavily right now, even for devices with stable prices enabled by long-term RAM procurement.
- maxnevermind 4mo agoI was also wondering if it will result in Helium shortage and even higher prices the next few years, then/if it will be all over, new fabs might also come online and it will be the opposite - a glut. I believe that follows the historic pattern of boom and bust cycles of chip production.
- glouwbug 4mo agoIt’s time to bring back all the old software hacks that were so common in the 90s
- Magi604 4mo agoHere's another data point for you all. Last year in April 2025 I bought 32gb DDR5 at $123.69. I checked it this most recent April and the exact same product was $679. All prices in Canadian dollars.
- mpweiher 4mo agoMaybe we can start to become a little less profligate with our memory usage. There certainly is lots and lots of potential.
- logotype 4mo agoI bought a server with 768GB RAM a couple of years ago, for cheap. Today just the RAM itself is worth more than I paid for the entire server. DDR4... Same thing with SSD, two years ago you could buy 4TB SSDs for like 250 USD, and today its more than $700. Madness!
- atum47 4mo agoI was in the US two weeks ago, looked everywhere for 1 module 32 gb ddr4 sodimm, couldn't find it anywhere. But apparently it was pretty expensive as well (from the price tag on the empty shelf in best buy)
- maerF0x0 4mo agoAs an ancient person, and considering my sense of inflation of other things I actually buy, This doesnt sound that high to me. At some point in my life CPU Ghz stopped rising and cores was the only thing to grow, and that seemed to be more slowly than clock rate did. So I guess I fully expected that asymptote to apply to RAM too. If you plot price per GB of ram across last 25 years the memory prices growth is barely a bump in the chart. In (nearly) no other physical product do we expect prices to plummet over time whilst simultaneously getting way better. Maybe we're just spoiled by the first 50 - 75 years of wild innovation that most new things go through before they asymptote ?
- nerdsniper 4mo agoI am also that many years old, and I don’t think your analogy holds for this particular situation. The exact same sticks/model #’s of RAM cost $200 last year, now costs $950. I don’t remember existing CPU’s ever going up in price by 5x (300-400% increases).
- maerF0x0 4mo agoMy point was never about cpu price, but that the pressures that made prices fall eventually faltered/stopped. Down 97.5% and then up 400% is still down 90%...
- icedchai 4mo agoYeah, I'm pretty ancient myself. If we look back ~30 years, we're still getting a good value at even these inflated prices for electronics. Food, housing, transportation has skyrocketed, but TVs and computers are comparatively cheap, even with RAM and storage being up 100+%.
- pmdr 4mo agoWe're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out. Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.
- DarkmSparks 4mo agothis is almost certainly a us tarriff/China sanctions thing rather than an AI thing. sticks here outside of the us tarriff system never really changed, I just bought like a month or two ago 128GB DDR5 for $500 at a time when US best buy was listing the same kingston 32GB sticks for $200 each. That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mindcrime 4mo agoIt's amazing that after all these years, a famous criticism of Neuromancer seems to have been mooted. That is, the bit about Case having that stash of stolen RAM that was his "big score" for the moment, and how Linda Lee stole it from him, yadda, yadda. For years people have read that and said something like "WTF? RAM isn't valuable enough to be a black market commodity". Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!
- theandrewbailey 4mo agoI work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I've been collecting some DDR5-based systems for months, but with the prices, they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty). I've priced them at about what the CPU + RAM + SSD would sell for separately, and I'm not willing to go much lower than that. And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).
- castlecrasher2 4mo ago>they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty) Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.
- theandrewbailey 4mo agoI've had them listed on FB Marketplace for months. In that time, I've sold four (3 to one guy, one to myself), and still have 20-ish more. i5-13500E, 32GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe, scratched and dinged a bit for $500 is practically a steal! Hardly anyone's biting or clicking, I don't get it... New open box models (not scratched and dinged), if anyone's interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179 https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179 Edit: they're intended to be retail POS PCs, like cash registers. (The motherboard literally has a header for a cash drawer!) So unless you're a particular kind of retailer, you're not asking your distributor for them. If distributors aren't looking for them, our B2B buyers aren't buying them. If they were Elite/Prodesks, Optiplexes, or Thinkcenters, they'd probably be gone by now.
- coryrc 4mo ago
- nickjj 4mo agoI'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price. Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours. All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price. I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
- mathgeek 4mo ago> I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price. Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.
- gib444 4mo agoA Steam Deck is as vital as food or fuel...?
- mathgeek 4mo agoI feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.
- ItsYan 4mo agoPeople can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.
- gattr 4mo ago[dead]
- Danox 4mo agoTake memory in house Apple (the talent is already there) its time again to kick another hardware supplier out and move on ala Intel, Nvidia, AMD, IBM, and Qualcomm outgoing in 2027-2028 if you want to continue to built devices and actually sell something to the public.
- sleepyguy 4mo agoThey would need their own FAB. Apple just designs, it doesn't really make anything, they sell devices where all the parts are manufactured by others.
- Danox 4mo agoPerfect opportunity for another joint partnership between TSMC and Apple in America, also a perfect opportunity for Intel unless they want to continue to make excuses.
- gck1 4mo agoI'm curious, how is Apple seemingly unaffected by this RAM supply crunch? Why are they not increasing prices 2x/3x?
- himata4113 4mo agoAll started by openai wafer capacity commitments that aren't being met anymore... The ECC ram systems I've bought are now worth more than the original purchase price of the entire system and I've been debating on just selling them since they're now worth nearly double their value which would outperform any stock trades I've ever made any given year lol.
- oybng 4mo agoThe demise of personal computing. All according to plan
- dcchambers 4mo agoHobbyist computing is dead for the foreseeable future. These prices are untenable.
- einpoklum 4mo agoSo I thought I would not be paying for that LLM BS just because you don't haven't been suckered into a subscription... I guess I was just lacking sufficient _intelligence_ to realize this kind of thing would happen.
- victorbjorklund 4mo agoRegret not buying more RAM last summer. And SSD:s as well. Prices are silly.
- elorant 4mo agoGPU prices have gone 5-10% down in the last month.
- drnick1 4mo agoThey are still too high. You can't buy any desirable GPU like a 5090 at MSRP.
- liendolucas 4mo agoIs it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM? Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments? For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.
- jillesvangurp 4mo agoActually I was using a laptop with 16GB around 2013 already. That's 13 years ago. Memory requirements kind of stagnated after that. Obviously, LLMs are driving up memory needs now. I have a 48GB development machine which is nice if you are running IDEs, backend stuff via docker, etc. And even just having a bunch of RAM there for file caching helps keep things fast.
- linguae 4mo agoI doubt that most computer users have more than 16GB of RAM in their systems. There are plenty of users on 8GB systems and some still on 4GB. Even when considering bloated Web apps, 8GB of RAM is passable and 16GB is plenty. I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.
- jacobgkau 4mo agoUse cases besides software development exist. Even relatively simple video editing can easily run past 16GB, and so can photo editing if you're working with more than a few high-resolution images at once. On the consumer side, YouTube in any Chromium-based browser with an ad blocker runs its memory usage up to 5GB+ if the tab's open too long. Add a couple of these use cases together, and you just need more RAM.
- jlarocco 4mo agoI guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me. But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoI guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me. It's not that bad, at least by recent standards, but the problem is that there's no such thing as "price per Gb." If you need 512 Gb you will not be buying 16 Gb DIMMs to get it. More likely you'll be buying 64 Gb ECC sticks, and those are much pricier.
- runjake 4mo agoCrucial has "good" prices for DDR5 6000mhz memory on Amazon. The downside is you have to wait for shipping -- I had to wait a couple weeks. I bought when these were $300 and equivalent memory prices were like $500 at the time. Been solid so far for 6-ish months. https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-Compatible/dp/B0CTHXMYL8/ https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-...
- kevinkeller 4mo agoMicron has exited the consumer business, so this is only till stocks last: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
- jscheel 4mo agoI tried to buy new SD cards for my camera. The cards I used to buy at $28 are now $80-120... if you can find them. Another cheaper card I used to buy for $19 is now $46. It's just absolutely insane at this point.
- shimman 4mo agoMy strategy of just buying the best quality parts within my budget when I need a new build has never failed me yet. Is pretty insane that I bought 4x 32gig dd4 ram for $400 in 2024; literally the same part I paid $200 now goes for over $900: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W Consumers need to start playing legal warfare against the companies for openly distorting the market. The ramifications will only hurt us and there needs to be a true comeuppance.
- jcalvinowens 4mo agoIt's unbelievable and it's only getting worse. A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for 11 months ago costs $910 today from the same retailer. A 2x16GB DRR4 kit that was $105 last year is now $230. The RAM alone in my newest machine would sell for over double what I paid for the entire machine one year ago.
- theSuda 4mo agoI have been wondering about selling one of my 32gb DDR5 sticks and use the money to buy something else. I don't think a gaming pc really needs more than 32gb ram anyway.
- jmyeet 4mo agoI bought a prebuilt mid-2025: 32GB DDR5-6000, 2TB SSD, 9800X3D, 5070 Ti for $1900. This happened to be good timing but you can still get these specs for a similar price occasionally eg [1] was $1899 last week. Luckily for me I bought a DDR5-6000 64GB kit for $200 for no real reason. And yeah that same kit is almost $1000 today. Plus I still have the old 32GB kit. If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too. Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc. But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite. [1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-11-AMD-Ryzen-7-9800X3D-GeForce-RTX-5070-Ti-DLSS-4-AI-Powered-Performance-32GB-DDR5-6400MHz-2TB-M-2-NVMe-SSD-ER9800X3/16180374694 https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-... [2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.aspx https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...
- TheAmazingRace 4mo agoLuckily, for gaming purposes in 2026, 32 GB of RAM is perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. I'd only consider 64 GB and up if you're using your system heavily for virtual machines or high end workstation level tasks.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- hinata08 4mo agoNot protecting the consumer segment, as well as industrial, corporate and government usages is not fair and a short term move in a democracy, in particular with who is in management these days Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us. Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers
- drusepth 4mo agoHow are people selling RAM (and GPUs) these days? I have a bunch to offload but Facebook Marketplace and eBay don't sound like they're very great for small, very expensive ($1-3k) electronics...
- forsalebypwner 4mo agohonestly eBay and FBMarketplace are the only two places I would even consider using. The worst part of FBM is dealing with flaky buyers, and the worst part of eBay is their fees.
- Havoc 4mo agoEBay works fine
- LetsGetTechnicl 4mo agoMust feed the AI slop machines!!
- surcap526 4mo ago[dead]
- aborsy 4mo agoDoes anyone know when will prices for RAM and drives drop to 2025 levels? The question is to buy or wait.
- nutjob2 4mo agoNo.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoCrap I regret never buying DDR5. Now I'm stuck on AM4. For now no issue but it can't last too long.
- stronglikedan 4mo agoAnd yet there's plenty available if you have the $375. That only makes sense if there's no shortage, but plenty of price gouging under the guise of a shortage.
- dekhn 4mo agoI remember when 32MB of RAM cost $375. I paid it anyway, even as a poor undergraduate, so I could avoid swapping while running g++, emacs, and X11 at the same time, on my cheap linux machine
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tracker1 4mo agoI bought 96gb (2x48gb) of relatively high speed DDR5 last year for about that price... the price inflation on ram and storage is insane.
- GoofGarage 4mo agoLord help you if you build an HEDT with a boatload of “tuner” memory to get a meaningful boost on actual productivity where memory latency and secondary/tertiary timings matter. I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock. For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.
- ticulatedspline 4mo agoKicking myself for not getting the other 2 sticks when I built my computer. I didn't really need them and had them in the cart, just never pulled the trigger. Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.
- CuriouslyC 4mo agoI bought a PC with 128GB of memory and a 3090 TI to do research on GPT-J in late 2022. This is the first time I've bought a piece of hardware that's appreciated in value.
- scrubs 4mo agoI just bought 128gb ecc ram ddr4 2667mhz $850 which indeed was +50% of purchase.
- thoughtpeddler 4mo agoI understand that standing up memory fabrication plants is no small feat, but how much of this is due to memory fabricators' patent moat? To what degree is this caused by IP barriers vs. the difficulty in actually manufacturing the things? If it's the case that even older-generation / process-node RAM is also going up in value, aren't those 'easier' to produce?
- NamTaf 4mo agoI fucking hate AI
- pjmlp 4mo agoWell, if this helps back to native, less Electron bloat, great.
- gck1 4mo agoMy unraid server alerted me today that one of the 28TB HDDs is at 100% capacity. I bought that drive for $290, a year ago. Today, it costs $590. I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.
- mugivarra69 4mo ago[dead]
- etempleton 3mo agoI like to look at the memory I bought a little less than a year ago which has gone from $300 at time of purchase in summer 2025 to $1250 to $1500 today. Absolute insanity.