“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
People buying RAM: oh no, what do we do?
People buying GPUs: first time?
OpenAI’s “Stargate” project has recently signed an agreement with Samsung and SK hynix for up to 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month. That figure alone would account for close to 40% of global DRAM output.
High-density NAND products are effectively sold out months in advance. Samsung’s next-generation V9 NAND is already nearly booked before it’s even launched. Micron has presold almost all of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) output through 2026. Contracts that once covered a quarter now span years, with hyperscalers buying directly at the source.
If China’s going to compete on AI, it’s going to be doing so with a limited supply of memory, I expect.
They’re going all in on domestic chip manufacturing, and they are catching up much faster than armchair generals, and even actual generals, predicted.
Doesn’t Windows 11 in practice require even more memory than Windows 10 to operate with decent performance?
Meanwhile my Linux gaming PC seems to actually use less memory than back when it was a Windows machine.
Constant surveillance will do that. Legit “telemetry” wouldn’t be using that much processing power.
I’m thinking Recall is just Microsoft trying to cut costs on their servers processing all the surveillance, and force users to pay the costs of all the extra electricity and equipment needed.
Nah it’s probably just Edge (aka Chrome) all over the new UI.
That wouldn’t show in the task manager as telemetry.
First crypto miners came for my video cards, then AI came for my DIMMS…
Next tech-sector grift will probably go for our network adapters or some shit…
I’ve got a stack of old 14.4 modems I’ll sell them if they’ll grift on that for a bit.
Remember that shitcoin that made HDD prices shoot up like crazy just because?
Now we just need a new nonsensical fad to drive Cases, Motherboards, CPUs and PSUs up and we’ll have come full circle
This seems like an appropriate place for me to bitch:
2 months ago I bought a new pre-built pc. It should’ve had 64gb of ram but had 32gb. They said the sticks they used were out of stock so they gave me a credit for $100 USD. I spent the 100 on 32gb more of what I thought was the exact same ram. I fucked up and bought a slightly higher speed so they wouldn’t work together after I tried for an afternoon. I also checked the correct listing i should’ve bought but it was more expensive, at about $125.
I gave up and decided I’d just buy the faster ram again when it came back, rather than return it and get the correct one. It went out of stock in the time it took me to get my order so I figured I’d just wait.
2 MONTHS later, it never came back in stock but an almost identical pair, with slightly different timing, is in stock right now at $216. If i had any idea this was coming in just 2 months, I could’ve just bought 64gb at once and started fresh, or corrected my mistake by returning what I bought.
So i guess I’ll continue waiting, but hey at least notepad has copilot in it.
I always thought ram of different speeds worked together, they just were run at the speed of the slowest stick.
I thought so too, but after a few hours I gave up.
I just don’t see the value of having 64gb of RAM. Not for the conventional user, not for gamers, not for the average power user either. Maybe there’s a need if you’re doing a lot of video editing and large file manipulation… but like… I would argue that MOST people, unless they’re trying to play AAA games while streaming and gooning don’t need more than 16gb
I have 32gb and I’ve never topped it out. And yea, Windows eats a lot (I really need to give up the ghost and migrate to Linux) but even still, 32gb, and I don’t even get close. 64gb is just going to be a lot of unused space. Bigger number doesn’t mean better. I doubt you’d even notice unless you fall into the previously mentioned category of users.
At this point, I originally paid for 64 so I’m trying to get there out of principal, and I’d be there if I paid more attention.
I like to dick around with my nerd stuff and I did have the pc lock up because I used all of the 32gb ram, but I suspect 64 would’ve had the same issue in that particular instance.
In either case, my last pc buy was a decade ago, where 16GB was more than you’d need. If prices are reasonable again, getting myself to 64GB would just make sure I’m set for another decade, probably.
I’ve capped out 32 and still do fairly regularly. But I used to do a bunch of 3D and rendering. Now I do photo editing and just have other stuff open. 64 would help a bit for me but I can live.
Just curious, what do you actually use which requires more than 32Go?
At the moment, not much. I’m trying to learn more and more and do more and more, really it’s just that I paid for 64, but then the seller and I both fucked up and I’m still at 32 now, which bugs me. Then at that same exact time frame, the prices skyrocketed.
Sorry to hear, hopefully you’ll get a solution soon. Thanks for the clarification
Hey what’s the Go unit? Is that short for GiB?
giga octet, like byte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)
Thank you!
just pop already
The market can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent
The thing is, the “people” propping it up, are massive tech companies with collectively trillions of dollars to burn on this thing that is making their stock prices soar.
They have no incentive as the primary investors doing the circular buying to stop. The big problem here is the stock market provides awful incentives to everyone.
neither did the housing speculators in the late 2000s though, it will come crashing down eventually.
though i wonder if yall gonna let them get bailed out again, that still remains to be seen.
This bubble is largely self dependent with all invested parties incentivised to prop it up. Completely different type of situation.
so, still a bubble like the housing crash?
No. The housing crash really started to go off when regular people could not pay their bills. These arent regular folks here. These are mega corporations.
that’s how a bubble works. they are mega corporations that represent like 90% of the economy. their companies go under, the people working for them are jobless all at once.
Are you like… just not reading the parts where I explain how these are massively different situations?
2 things can be bubbles while being massively different in the forces at play.
Laughs in ddr4…
It also got affected.
God fucking damnit, can’t I even be poor in peace, JFC!
Although it’s ambiguous how much of this is due to AI data centres and how much is the natural ramp-down of DDR4 production.
DDR3 also increased substantially in price a few years after DDR4 became available.
Is DDR3 affected too?
soon the bubble will burst and RAM will be so cheap! (I hope)
I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.
AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.
Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.
It always does. I remember buying my DDR4 RAM 200€, and two months later the same kit was 550€. Some month later it was back at 220€.
Buy one RAM and you get two GPUs thrown in for free!
Genuine question here, for a “normal” computer user, say somebody who :
- browses the Web
- listens to music, play videos, etc
- sometimes plays video games, even 2025 AAAs and already has a GPU relatively recent and midrange, say something from e.g. 2020
- even codes something of a normal size, let’s say up to Firefox size (which is huge)
… which task does require more than say 32Go?
If by normal you average, they don’t even really need 16gb.
Creative work can gobble up ram, heavy ass multitasking does as well.
So it’s more in the digitally productive professional or hobbyist cases where you need such amounts as a person.For development high amounts of rams can be useful for all sorts of stuff, it’s not just compiling, but also testing, though 32 is often enough.
For normal use like that 16GB is generally just fine. Some games can use enough that you’ll need to close Firefox and other RAM hungry programs though.
As far as needing more than that, people who do heavy design work or edit videos and that kind of thing generally do. For example 32GB running Fusion in Davinci Resolve can be a bit limiting sometimes with higher resolution or 10 bit footage.
For a normal user, 16G is still enough.
But for a power user like me, a Dev, with multiple IDE open, multiple browsers, a database manager with a dockerized DB, I’m basically at 96-98% RAM all the time.
But even then, if you use a local AI, prepare to loose multiple Gigs to it.
I already used more than 30 Gigs on one LLM (dolphin-mixtral:8x7B for the curious), when I tried testing it, and a more reasonable Mistral:7B still took me like 4Gigs just to run.
What are the odds SAltman and the circular investment crew are pivoting to a pump and dump scheme on server hardware (as well as just GPGPUs) after finally admitting to themselves LLMs have hit a wall not even trillions of dollars will fix (architecture failure, no AGI for you, no getting away from those pesky workers like promised). If everything pans out nicely the world will end up with a bunch of new chip fabs (a real bottleneck) and nothing to use them for, cheap computers for all. Probably won’t, instead we’ll get a geopolitical shitshow as China (and hopefully Europe) will have functional, actually producing valuable stuff, economies. What happens to the US is left as an exercise for the reader.
Welp, it’s probably about time for my PC to break its RAM again.
Not sure if it’s exactly the same kit but you can get that for £300 in the UK.
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I bought 16gb of ddr4 for 110eu back in 2018. Welcome back to the DDR wars, with NAND soon to follow.
Wow I just checked the laptop kit I bought a month ago it is 50% more E: it’s fucking over 100% more now wow it was a 64gb sodimm kit I got for 280AUD and now it is 700AUD fucking hell
Even ignoring the price hike, if you have to save for months to buy RAM, you should probably save it instead. Doesnt sound like a very smart financial decision to spend every last cent on your PC.
It could be just a kid doing odd jobs to upgrade their computer.
you sound like a guy i know who wanted to be a car mechanic but failed to qualify for the job on account of talking too much shit; but they hired him as a car sales instead with commission so his salary got 8x higher. of course he always gives financial advice now that he’s rich. for example, you shouldn’t buy a house near the city if you can’t afford one. you shouldn’t buy a car if you can’t afford one. and you shouldn’t buy a mobile phone and a subscription if you can’t afford it.
so if we break it down, his advice is: if you have a shitty job that pays you poorly; you don’t deserve to live in any kind of proximity to your shitty job, you should also have no means of transportation to said shitty job (because you now live far away from the city and would actually need a car to get to your job), nor any means of bank and digital ID access (to receive your shitty salary, because its priced outside of the bare minimum wage you’re forced to subsist on).
Clearly people dont seem to like my take and its sort of expected. I also despise the whole “just dont by those avocados if you cant afford them” thing that rich people loving pushing. But damn if it takes “months” to save up 280$ then you are basically living paycheck to paycheck. I feel like i would prefer having an extra 280$ of emergency savings in that situation rather than slightly fancier RAM sticks.
Obviously lots of assumptions there. Could just be a kid saving up pocket money. Could be someone that earns plenty of money and just decides to only spend a very limited amount on hobbies.
