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I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x.. 128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,0
by sbarre 11mo ago
I'm so mad about this, I need DDR5 for a new mini-PC I bought and prices have literally gone up by 2.5x..
128GB used to be 400$ in June, and now it's over $1,000 for the same 2x64GB set..
I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks.
- IshKebab 11mo agoDamn I bought a whole computer with 128GB RAM & 16-core Ryzen CPU for £325 a few months ago.
- secondcoming 11mo agonew?
- PunchyHamster 11mo agoand the guy that sold it to you stole it from where ?
- tempest_ 11mo agoOrdered some servers 6 months ago ~12k USD per unit. Same order, same bill of materials, 17.5K USD per unit today. That is roughly a 5.5k increase for 768GB of DDR5 ECC memory and the 4 2tb nvme ssds.
- loeg 11mo ago> I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks. Years, or when the AI bubble pops, whatever comes first. Similar situation with QLC flash and HDDs btw.
- phoboslab 11mo agoI just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800). It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.
- Terr_ 11mo agoAside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.
- sheepscreek 11mo agoAlso we’re likely comparing RAMs at different speeds and memory bandwidth.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Temporary_31337 11mo agoI think that goes to show that official inflation benchmarks are not very practical / useful in terms of buckets of things that people actually buy or desire. If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...
- Aurornis 11mo ago> If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher... A house is $500,000 A GPU is $500 You could put GPUs into the inflation bucket and it wouldn’t change anything. Inflation trackers count cost of living and things you pay monthly, not one time luxury expenses every 4 years that geeks buy for entertainment.
- dboreham 11mo agoAlso need to account for the dollar decline vs other currencies (which yes is possibly somewhat factored into dollar inflation so you'd have to do the inflation calculation in Euros then convert to dollars accounting for the decline in value).
- bombcar 11mo ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo agoI'm still on DDR3 :)
- minkeymaniac 11mo agoDoubled in the last 4 months https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5Zc-FsUDCM Upgraded by adding 64GB.. last Friday I sold the 32 GB I took out for what I paid for the 64 GB in July... insane
- incompatible 11mo agoTime to start scouring used-PC sales to reclaim the RAM and sell it for a profit?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- chii 11mo agobut why wouldn't that used-PC simply increase in price due to the components becoming more expensive?
- hattmall 11mo agoInformation asymmetry
- ThrowawayR2 11mo agoHave you not noticed the domain of the submitted article? Others are way, way ahead on that already. (Including the submitter. In their comment history is "Tip: You can sell used server RAM or desktop modules through BuySellRam to recover value from old hardware." at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800881 and all of the submissions of this domain are from this user: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buysellram.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buysellram.com )
- Aurornis 11mo agoIf you can find used PCs being liquidated with DDR4 RAM that is fast enough for a modern build, then you might. Old RAM that comes out of the PCs being sold at fire sale prices isn’t really in demand though. Even slower DDR4 grades aren’t seeing much demand.
- ajb 11mo agoDram alternates between feast and famine; it's the nature of a business when the granularity of investment is so huge (you have a fab or you don't, and they cost billions -maybe trillions by now). So, it will swing back. Unfortunately it looks like maybe 3-5 years on average, from some analysis here: https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html https://storagesearch.com/memory-boom-bust-cycles.html (That's just me eyeballing it, feel free to do the math)
- addaon 11mo agoNothing costs trillions.
- chmod775 11mo agoIf you had a trillion dollars you might find some things are for sale that otherwise wouldn't be...
- nolok 11mo agoTo be fair, nobody HAS a trillion dollar either. They have stuff that may be worth a trillion dollar when sold.
- boguscoder 11mo agoHave you seen our debt recently?..
- jbverschoor 11mo agoA waiver is a waiver. The cost is per square mm. It’s pure supply and demand
- chmod775 11mo agoNo, a wafer is very much not a wafer. DRAM processes are very different from making logic*. You don't just make memory in your fab today and logic tomorrow. But even when you stay in your lane, the industry operates on very long cycles and needs scale to function at any reasonable price at all. You don't just dust off your backyard fab to make the odd bit of memory whenever it is convenient. Nobody is going to do anything if they can't be sure that they'll be able to run the fab they built for a long time and sell most of what they make. Conversely fabs don't tend to idle a lot. Sometimes they're only built if their capacity is essentially sold already. Given how massive the AI bubble is looking right now, I personally wouldn't expect anyone to make a gamble building a new fab. * Someone explained this at length on here a while ago, but I can't seem to find their comment. Should've favorited it.
- nyrikki 11mo agoI just gave up and built an AM4 system with a 3090 because I had 128G of ddr4 udimms on hand the whole build was for less than just the memory would have cost for an AM5/ddr5 build. Really wish that I could replace my old skylake-x system but even ddr4 rdimms for an older xeon are crazy now let alone ddr5. Unfortunately I need slots for 3xTitan V's for the 7.450 TFLOPS each of FP64. Even the 5090 only does 1.637 TFLOPS for FP64, so just hopping that old system keeps running.
- touisteur 11mo agoIf you don't need full ieee-754 double precision, ozaki scheme (emulation with tensor cores) might do the trick. It's been added (just a little bit) to cublas recently.
- Tempest1981 11mo agoWhy do we all need 128GB now? I was happy with 32. Close a few Chrome tabs, and save some DDR5 for the rest of us. :-)
- cactusplant7374 11mo agoI like to tell people I have 128GB. It's pretty rare to meet someone like me that isn't swapping all the time.
- nehal3m 11mo agoI also tell people that. It’s not true, but it’s free.
- laterium 11mo agoWhy did you waste all your money on 32gb when 4gb is enough? Why did we all need 32gb?
- rhdunn 11mo agoIt depends on what you are doing. If you are working on an application that has several services (database, local stack, etc.) as docker containers, those can take up more memory. Especially if you have large databases or many JVM services, and are running other things like an IDE with debugging, profiling, and other things. Likewise, if you are using many local AI models at the same time, or some larger models, then that can eat into the memory. I've not done any 3D work or video editing, but those are likely to use a lot of memory.
- 11mo ago
- knowitnone3 11mo agoit's cyclical. just wait 10 years
- thfuran 11mo agoGood advice for the immortal. For everyone else, "do something else instead" is more practical.
- omgwtfbyobbq 11mo agoI think it's somewhat useful long term advice, and I would add that parts prices tend to be asynchronous. Building a PC in a cost efficient manner generally requires someone to track parts prices over years, buy parts at different times, and buy at least a generation behind. The same applies to many other markets/commodities/etc...
- indemnity 11mo agoWow, no kidding. I checked my BOM for the 9950 build I did a year ago, RAM price has doubled for the exact same DDR5-6000 sticks.
- MangoToupe 11mo agoSuch is life. I suggest finding a less volatile hobby, like crocheting. Actually, the textile market is pretty volatile in the US these days with Joan's out of business. Pick a poison, I guess? There's little room for stability in a privately-owned-world.
- brenainn 11mo agoMy 64gb DDR5 kit started having stability issues running XMP a few weeks out of warranty. I bought it two years ago. Looked into replacing it and the same kit is now double the price. Bumping the voltage a bit and having better cooling gets it through memtest thankfully. The fun of building your own computer is pretty much gone for me these days.
- hulitu 11mo ago> I have no idea if/when prices will come back down but it sucks. Usually after the companies are fined for price-fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- jimnotgym 11mo agoInteresting that Samsung put their prices up 60% today, and a retailer who bought their stock at the old price feels compelled to put their prices up 2.5x. When the AI bubble bursts we can get back to the old price
- Aurornis 11mo agoThe cost of inventory on the shelves basically doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the market rate. If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices, so there wouldn’t actually have been weeks of low retail RAM prices for everyone. Every once in a while you can catch a retailer whose pricing person missed the memo and forgot to update the retail price when the announcement came out. They go out of stock very rapidly.
- 1718627440 11mo ago> If those retailers didn’t increase their prices when the price hike was announced, anyone building servers would have instantly purchased all of the inventory anyway at the lower prices But that retailer would have made a lot of money in a very short time.
- Workaccount2 11mo agoIn the scenario where they don't raise prices, they sell out immediately. In the scenario where they do raise prices, it's too expensive so you don't buy it. In the scenario where they keep prices low, and do a lottery to see who can buy them, you don't get picked. No matter what, you are not getting those modules at the old price. There are few things that trip up people harder than this exact scenario, and it happens everywhere. Concert tickets, limited releases, water during crises, hot Christmas gift, pandemic GPUs, etc. Once understood you can stop getting mad over it like it's some conspiracy. It's fundamental and natural market behavior.
- barrkel 11mo agoI guess I lucked out. I bought a 768GB workstation (with 9995wx CPU and rtx 6000 Pro Blackwell GPU) in August. 96GB modules were better value than 128GB. That build would be a good bit pricier today looks like.
- grgr8 11mo agowhat's your usecase for such a build?
- shevy-java 11mo agoYeah you are not alone here being annoyed. I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc... Those price increases are not normal at all. I understand that most of it still comes from market demands but this is also skewing the market now in unfair manners. Such increases smell of criminal activity too.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> I think we need to penalise all who drive the prices up - that includes the manufacturers but also AI companies etc... You want to penalize companies for buying things and penalize companies for selling things are market rate? There are a lot of good examples through history about how central planning economics and strict price controls do not lead to good outcomes. The end result wouldn’t be plentiful cheap RAM for you. The end result would be no RAM for you at all because the manufacturers choose to sell to other countries who understand basic economics.
- pjc50 11mo agoI think there's a case for banning the sale of services well below the marginal cost of supplying that service - loss leaders, or "dumping" - when it's done on such a scale as AI marketing.
- redohmy 11mo agoThat is terrible. Only less than half year! If all countries keep building AI centers, it will talk a long time for the price to be back to reasonable status.