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RAM kits are now sold with one fake RAM stick alongside a real one
- mcfedr 7mo agoAI sucks doesn't it
- amelius 7mo agoYes, even more than COVID. At least during that period I could buy PC parts without problems. Looking forward to the next AI winter.
- echelon 7mo agoI'm getting so much more done with AI, it's wild. The AI boom has only just begun. This is literally the next industrial revolution. And it's only now starting to take off.
- sidewndr46 7mo agoThis article seems a bit dramatic in it's title? People have purchased "blank" RAM for years for the aesthetic of it. I do not personally see the point, but I also don't have motherboards with unpopulated RAM slots. If a company wants to sell a kit that is 50/50, I am not sure that is actually a problem.
- scotty79 7mo agoFirst time hearing about this, it's pretty dramatic for me. I grew up in times when computers were off-white and we liked it.
- halapro 7mo agoModding has been a thing for 20+ years though, people spend money for aesthetic purposes only.
- scotty79 7mo agoAnd I mourned every second of it.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoInstead, value that different humans value different things, life would be utterly boring if everyone was the same, wouldn't it?
- scotty79 7mo agoI jest of course, but I do seem to have min-maxing tendencies.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoWell, the better news is that awareness is the first step towards being able to iterate/fix something :) Take care!
- rjh29 7mo agoModders min-max for aesthetics!
- bigstrat2003 7mo agoTo be fair, it can affect the non-modders as well. I remember being very annoyed when I found out, after I had already bought it, that my current GPU comes with RGB lights that automatically turn on.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoI think that says more about you than the ecosystem at large, people been modding computers for decades at this point, hardly new that some people seem to care more about looks than actually features/functionality/specifications :) Personally I'm with you (but black), my entire desktop is just one color, and if a component is available in RGB and non-RGB and the difference isn't too big, I pay extra for that non-RGB version (which doesn't make sense it's even the case, but here we are). I guess you could argue that we're all obsessed with the looks, some that all RAM slots are occupied, some that RGB is everywhere, some that the PC case should be off-white and slowly morph into beige, others that everything should be minimally black.
- ralferoo 7mo agoYeah, when I specced my last desktop purchase a few years ago, I just chose the cheapest 4x16GB sticks from a decent brand. Didn't even occur to me that they'd be RGB monstrosities shining their stupid lights out through the case window. The AIO radiator was also similarly annoying, but at least the RGB can be disconnected on that! I hadn't even considered having a case window to be a problem as the previous PC build had a window, but fortunately nothing glowing apart from a couple of small status LEDs on the motherboard. I don't particularly want to install the bloatware required just to turn off the LEDs, so I've resorted to hiding the PC under a desk at the other side of the room and have long DP and USB cables to the desk where I actually sit. This also has the nice side effect of not being able to hear the fans either!
- fecal_henge 7mo agoI had no idea what RGB was on my spec selection. Thank God I picked a boring opaque box. Must be quite a party in there.
- bombcar 7mo agoI remember being annoyed that it was hard to get the CDROM burner to match the case if you weren’t standard beige, and when black/clear came out it looked so bad for awhile!
- Fluorescence 7mo agoI would love to have blanks for every unused socket/port to keep dust out. I'm just too cheap to pay for them though...
- no-name-here 7mo agoYes these have been around since at least 2018 - here’s a 2018 link about Corsair’s version: https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/fake_dimms_corsair_launches_dramless_vengeance_rgb_pro_kits_for_aesthetic_use/ https://overclock3d.net/news/memory/fake_dimms_corsair_launc...
- drivingmenuts 7mo agoThis is the computer equivalent of "comfort nuts" for a neutered dog, which is really about the owner, not the dog.
- myself248 7mo agoAnd pickup trucks, for some reason.
- drivingmenuts 7mo agoSlight difference - truck nuts are a crass joke. Comfort nuts are supposed to be a psychological crutch for a dog. The owners actually believe the dog has an issue in the same way that some circumcised humans do.
- FpUser 7mo agoFirst time in my life I hear about fake RAM
- spacecadet 7mo agoMany kit builders with flashy PCs are only running 32gb. If you look at datasets like Steams, most people are still on 16 and 32. Hell 4% are still on 8!
- embedding-shape 7mo agoMeanwhile I moved platform from AM4 at exactly the wrong moment, and downgraded RAM (temporarily, I hope) from 192GB to 96GB and feel like I'm missing half my workspace when I need it.
- iberator 7mo ago96bb is like 1% of population. this is not normal. optimize your stack mate.
- FpUser 7mo agoMaybe you should tell that to 1% of the people who own half of the world instead
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> 96bb is like 1% of population. this is not normal. optimize your stack mate. Of course it isn't normal, that's why I made my comment, to highlight the contrast. And no, my stack is optimized, you have no idea what I'm doing, yet somehow feel confident enough to know what my stack should/shouldn't look like? Man, the hubris of some people... Next you'd probably tell me my Threadripper 9970X and RTX PRO 6000 is overkill, based on some other unrelated metrics.
- spacecadet 7mo ago
- BoredPositron 7mo agoIt's an RGB kit you could get Corsair dummies for like 10 years now for look maxing your build.
- wolvoleo 7mo agoAt least they are upfront about it. I don't see the point though even for a gaming setup, as the fake modules will still reduce airflow. Also, gaming boards usually have 4 slots (in 2 banks). I would fill at least 2, so I'd rather have a matched kit of 2 modules, and 2 separate fillers, if I did use them. It is quite common to leave 2 memory slots empty (of RAM) because many boards can't drive the memory at top speed if you use all 4 slots.
- daneel_w 7mo agoAnd stuffing your PC case with various disco lights doesn't affect its performance either. But an evidently large portion of gamers are, well, special people.
- tekla 7mo agoIt does, however, open up your computer to fun security bugs that were totally unnecessary, but you know, you gotta make your computer look like modern art. https://www.pcgamesn.com/asus-gigabyte-security-flaws-secureauth https://www.pcgamesn.com/asus-gigabyte-security-flaws-secure...
- boca_honey 7mo agoAesthetics are more important for some people than The 0.01% percent chance of an obscure, 8 year old security annomaly. I think those computers look horrible, but they are harmless.
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoLmao, I got RGB coz it was the cheaper one
- amarant 7mo agoLol same, it's blinking away in a case with no window, so at least I don't have to see it!
- 7mo ago
- RobotToaster 7mo agoI don't get it. Isn't 2x8gb faster than 1x16gb since it will run in dual channel? And shouldn't smaller capacity sticks be cheaper since they can use lower density chips?
- officialchicken 7mo agoThink of it as RGB lighting in DIMM format and it makes a lot more nonsense.
- barishnamazov 7mo agoNobody really buys 8gb sticks anymore, so selling 2x8gb isn't economically great. Also, there are more factors than just density in RAM pricing, but it really depends on the vendor and chip layout design.
- vmg12 7mo agoPeople don't want to buy 2x8gb because there are limited slots on a motherboard and they want to upgrade when they need the extra ram.
- exabrial 7mo agoUp to a certain point and It’s actually very dependent on the CPU. Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier. You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks. Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.
- p_ing 7mo agoIt's the signal integrity and applies to desktop class boards, as well. A fully populated four DIMM Intel or AMD board will need to run at a slower mega transfer rate than a two DIMM board (or a four DIMM board with only two DIMMs populated)
- elnerd 7mo agoI have a fully populated server with 2x7K62 and 16x64GB (3200 mhz) for my home lab. Do you know how to check if I am affected by this?
- debo_ 7mo agoWe should call the fake stick "NAM" for "no access memory." Then you can tell your kids that they couldn't possibly understand, man, because they weren't _there_.
- fschuett 7mo ago[dead]
- pooper 7mo ago[flagged]
- wizzwizz4 7mo agoIf you compose a text of enough references and (well-known) in-jokes, and get the perplexity/burstiness stats right, you too can reliably produce text that the AI-detectors think is inhuman. I suspect that doesn't work so well for the latest-generation AI-detection systems (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103465 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inffus.2025.103465), but there's definitely a way to fool those, too.
- Maken 7mo agoYou can make 100% AI content by just adding a short summary at the and of any text.
- debo_ 7mo agoCan you just follow me around and do this to all my one-liner posts?
- est31 7mo agoI've been 8 years on this site, and I have 8 favorite comments. This comment just made it into a very exclusive club.
- whatshisface 7mo ago[flagged]
- resters 7mo agoThis is the "Trumpification" of gaming PCs, thanks in part to the trade war.
- Dwedit 7mo agoThis time, it has more to do with diminished supply combined with heavy demand rather than a trade war.
- Simulacra 7mo agoI'm confused, could someone help me clarify: is this just one stick of RAM, and one stick of absolutely nothing, purely for aesthetics? I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot? Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything? From the read, it seems like… A scam?
- philjohn 7mo agoMeanwhile lots of people in the PC building community have cases with glass panels on the side, and go to a lot of effort to make the inside look a certain way. This includes things like custom sleeved cables, perfect cable management, RGB on various things. I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)
- Sharlin 7mo agoI'm not in the market for LED bling (though I guess I might've been back when I was 15), but the neat cable management of today's cases definitely appeals to my sense of aesthetics, compared to the terrible mess of the yesteryear.
- ryandrake 7mo agoIsn't the primary purpose of having an all-metal computer case that it acts as shielding to keep RF interference and noise generated by noisy PC components from leaking out? I never understood having a giant tempered glass panel on the side, totally defeating the purpose of the case.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Someone 7mo ago> I can't even see inside my CPU, why would I care if there's an empty slot? Then, you’re not the target audience. > Why would I pay for a piece of plastic to fill that slot that doesn't do anything? It doesn’t do nothing. FTA: “Their sole purpose is cosmetic, though. While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, they don't contribute to your computer’s memory capacity or performance.” This is for people with transparent PC cases and memory sticks with RGB LED lighting. For example, see https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/products/ddr4-32gb-8gbx4-prism-pro-rgb-u-dimm-gaming-memory https://v-color.net/collections/prism-pro-rgb-memory-voclor/...: “RGB SOFTWARE SYNCHRONIZATION SUPPORT Dynamic RGB lighting control synchronized across main leading M/B such as RGB FUSION, MSI Mystic Light Sync, AURA Sync, POLYCHROME Sync etc. Customize lighting profiles or assign colors to each LEDs to create your own spectacular look.“
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- senectus1 7mo agowow... the enshittification of everything is getting faster every day.
- JonChesterfield 7mo agoBad idea. I would be very angry to discover I've bought this. Customer support are going to get shouted at and products returned.
- duskdozer 7mo agoLots of two-packs followed by one-returns.
- colechristensen 7mo agoIf you read the article it shows the packaging and is incredibly obvious that one of them is RAM and the other one is filler. >Performance RAM + RGB Filler Kit >Complete RGB Look Instantly
- cwillu 7mo agoYou've clearly never worked in retail.
- Cloudef 7mo agoWhy haven't prebuilt PC market been doing this to hide the fact they are using a single RAM stick?
- onionisafruit 7mo agoA fake still costs more than nothing, and they are famous for saving pennies any place they can.
- sysguest 7mo agofking can't understand this one... I mean, it's much cheaper to buy 2x8gb than 1x16gb or even 1x32gb (and 2x8gb is faster than 1x16gb..) are these people idiots??? ram-slots are computer real-estates
- ajnin 7mo ago"I'd like 32G but I can't afford 2x16G right now so I'll buy a single stick and keep a slot open for later when prices are better or I get more available money". Seems pretty easy to understand.
- daft_pink 7mo agoThis is the reason people hate marketers.
- russdill 7mo agoThis is a product that some people want and it's marketed for exactly what it is.
- themafia 7mo agoThis is the reason I hate lobbyists. There is no sensible reason for the RAM market to be priced the way it is. It's obviously unchecked corruption. There's clearly more value in allowing that corruption than exposing and punishing it.
- uyjulian 7mo agoReminds me of Rambus / RDRAM terminator RAM sticks.
- zzzeek 7mo ago> While they light up and synchronize with your existing RGB ecosystem, RAM has lights ? wow I've been living in a cave
- alpaca128 7mo agoCan't wait for people to buy two of these sets, take the real RAM sticks and refund the two fake ones in one package. There's no way the seller is going to manually check every returned stick.
- LastMuel 7mo agoQuickest way for this idea to die a horrible death.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoWhy won't they check? It says it on the stick with text. It doesn't look identical.
- ryukoposting 7mo agoDoes it say it on both sides? Just flip it over.
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoSwap the radiators around
- kbolino 7mo agoThe edge connectors also look quite off, like two-thirds of the traces are missing, but that does take a discerning eye to notice.
- inaros 7mo agoNow that you leaked the beans...
- dathinab 7mo agopeople already have been doing that with fake "rgb only" RAM sticks
- SoftTalker 7mo ago... and then the next person who buys RAM on Amazon gets the returned package with the two fake sticks.
- Dwedit 7mo agoAre we back to the days of RDRAM when having a blank memory module was actually required?
- skibz 7mo agoI miss the days when most people had a vanilla looking computer. You wouldn't have felt out of place at the LAN party lugging in your dad's old Packard Bell tower that you used for your gaming rig. We still appreciated visually stunning PCs. Not just for the works of art that they were, but also for the DIY skill and ethic you were actually required to demonstrate to build and mod them. Nowadays, it's all just "RGB by default". By my angry old man standards, it looks gauche. Then again, I suppose it's the new vanilla?
- fwipsy 7mo agoAny popular aesthetic will be commoditized eventually. The new frontier is SFF PCs! -Rockin a ~5L SKTC A07 with r5-5600, rtx 4060, and zero RGB.
- badlucklottery 7mo agoI've been a watercooling "enthusiast" for about 20 years now and, while the DIY-ness of the old school builds was a lot of fun for young me, I'm also glad I can just buy some off-the-shelf (or at worst "small batch") components that let me get really effective and near silent performance by just slamming some stuff together. No more scouring junk yards for a particular heater core from wrecked cars or modding aquarium pumps. That being said, I also never really understood the "add colorful lights to your PC" aspect of some builds.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoI always thought of the lit cases as an instance of "I could put a cool LED light in this space, but I also need the space for my computer ... oh, hey, I could do both". I have never used a lit case.
- merelysounds 7mo agoIn other news, there are new cases in beige being produced, some with turbo buttons and mock 5.25 inch floppy drives. https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chassis/flp02/ https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/info/computer-chas...
- 7mo ago
- dsign 7mo agoSlight tangent, I found this chart for the prices of RAM: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet. Though the other day I learned there are many technologies for "RAM", and most of them are garbage for LLMs but still useful for other things, like microcontrollers. So I'm thinking my next "build" is going to be a guitar.
- dom96 7mo agoSuper interesting charts there. What's really interesting to me is that the GPU prices (which also includes RAM) didn't see such a massive increase in price as the RAM itself. Anyone know why that is?
- MengerSponge 7mo agoRAM is just part of the GPU bill of materials? It might also be that NVIDIA is a natural monopoly, while memory manufacturers are a cartel...
- SloopJon 7mo agoI held my nose and bought an RTX 5070 Ti for $100 over MSRP in January. The very next week the same model was up $200. It turns out that NVIDIA had been subsidizing retail graphics cards with its Open Pricing Program. Not the whole story, but it may help explain the relative flatness of the graph until the end of January. The other part of it is that the MSRP already baked in a substantial increase from the previous generation. While RAM was near rock-bottom pricing when this hit, current-gen GPUs definitely were not.
- recursivecaveat 7mo agoA $1500 5800 only has 16GB which would be $250 if you compare it against the DDR6 graph on that page. Given that there's only 2 top tier GPU manufacturers at most, they were probably already not very BOM cost sensitive.
- MengerSponge 7mo ago> It's not looking good, I don't think supply is catching with demand yet. Surely this will be helped by a helium supply shock.
- cwillu 7mo agoThere is no reason for this to exist except to trick people.
- throwaheyy 7mo agoBuild PC with 16gb now, upgrade to 32gb in the future, not be stuck with surplus 2x8gb afterwards.
- cwillu 7mo agoYou don't need a placeholder stick to do that.
- mihaaly 7mo agoThe word fits here is pretend.
- iso-logi 7mo ago[dead]
- erikerikson 7mo agoOops, someone hit publish 18 days early. [edit: 19, article published yesterday]
- youknownothing 7mo agoso this is like men who use silicone implants resembling muscles to appear strong, even though they're weak AF xD https://www.bestbodyimplants.com/gallery_implants/male-implants-gallery/ https://www.bestbodyimplants.com/gallery_implants/male-impla...
- aitchnyu 7mo agoArent we supposed to have matching RAM sticks for dual channel performance in modern computers?
- codethief 7mo agoSupposed to… maybe. But can you? > Even if your budget only allows you to purchase a single real memory module, you can still achieve the look of a dual-module setup in your build. > For users aiming for peak performance, a dual-channel memory configuration remains the gold standard. However, with memory prices currently inflated, it’s easy to see the appeal of cost-effective options like V-Color’s 1+1 memory kits. :-)
- tzs 7mo agoCould these actually be functionally useful or are they purely aesthetic? For example, dust can short out electrical connections. Can enough dust get into an open RAM slot to cause problems?
- butz 7mo agoHow about we use all that AI and start doing some serious optimizations to existing software? Reduce memory requirements by half, or even more.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoLLMs are intrinsically deaigned for token production, which is typically inversely related to optimization and efficoency.
- TeMPOraL 7mo agoPlenty of people do. AI is one of the few major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. It's potentially applicable to everything, which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything. Including developing new optimization algorithms, optimizing optimizing compilers, optimizing applications, optimizing systems, optimizing hardware, ... Big AI vendors are at the forefront of it, because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution, so any efficiency improvement saves them money.
- themafia 7mo ago> comparable to the Internet and electricity. It will be when it actually exists. > which is why right now everyone is trying to apply it to everything And are any of them actually succeeding? Where are the new AI businesses? Where's the new wealth and money? Where's the one guy AI pioneer doing what used to take 100s? > because they're the ones who actually pay for the AI revolution Their customers do. The customers are getting ripped off. They want the AI revolution, what they got was a crappy search engine, and copyright whitewashing service instead.
- ben_w 7mo ago> It will be when it actually exists. The first electrical motors and lightbulbs absolutely sucked, but the former was still a radical transformation from factories based on a huge steam engine prime mover distributing motive power via belts and pulleys, and the latter was still an improvement over gas lanterns. The very early internet also sucked, but was nevertheless useful. This was still true even for the very early public web, which was decades later. The AI which already actually exists is a major general technological breakthroughs, comparable to the Internet and electricity. Any given AI doesn't need to be superhuman to be comparable. > And are any of them actually succeeding? Yup. Old example now, but most physical post (at least in industrialised nations) is now read and sorted by machines which learned to read handwriting as well as printed addresses. ML on handwritten text was basically the "hello world" of AI even 5-10 years back. And online, spam filtering has always needed help from AI. Before Transformers came along, the state of the art for natural language processing was just counting words in whichever bucket (sales for spam, good-and-bad for sentiment, etc.) and applying Bayesian rules. This kind of thing was the bread and butter of AI before ChatGPT came along and people forgot AI could be anything beyond a chatbot. Though even as a chatbot, it's a surprisingly effective tool; heck, even as autocomplete it's a surprisingly effective tool, and that's about the weakest thing you can do with it. > Where are the new AI businesses? Where's the new wealth and money? Google. Like, not just today's Google, the original one. The whole thing about Page Rank is a matrix multiply, and then they added personalisation and ads which uses your every action as signal to optimise a multi-armed-bandit problem. It is, in fact, a machine learning problem; it is AI. And of course the thing with ads is this argument applies to all ad agencies, so also Facebook. (And not just how Facebook has AI generated scams etc., though even scams are still "where's the money"). Ditto recommendation engines. Both for what news article to read next, what goods Amazon or eBay etc. will suggest, and what shows or clips YouTube etc. will suggest. And translation. If you forget machine learning and try to write translation software as a traditional piece of software, it will suck: the example I was given when I was young was someone's attempt that ended up with "water sheep" for "hydraulic rams". Google Translate wasn't the first, nor only, tool, but Google did invent the Transformer model specifically for improved translations. And while Google didn't monetise this directly (but did put auto-translation into Chrome and (IIRC) Android apps so perhaps indirectly), some of the other translation companies sure did. > Where's the one guy AI pioneer doing what used to take 100s? Depending on what you mean, either "LMGTFY", or "they joined the big companies to do even more because resources", or "the people posting AI-generated projects on Show HN", or "you can sort of see this by looking at employee count and finding the ones with very small head-counts: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/ai https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/ai " To combine the examples, here's an AI product originally authored by one person to do translation on OCR'ed text which got bought by big tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens
- amelius 7mo agoI already put "Use as little RAM as possible." in my custom prompt.
- wildpeaks 7mo agoIt's not a new thing, it's a common way to fill empty slots for aesthetic purposes, especially with RGB builds in aquarium cases.
- SilentM68 7mo agoHad a similar experience at AliExpress (US site). Purchased M.2 drive but what I got was stick of chewing gum (not literally but you get the idea). Never bought anything from them again.
- voganmother42 7mo agoThe fabled write only memory
- speakbits 7mo agoWow... never really realized people actually used these things and didn't just chuck them after opening their RAM>
- cineticdaffodil 7mo ago[dead]
- bdcravens 7mo agoA few months ago I upgraded a Windows laptop I use in my 3d printer studio from 32gb to 64gb. I let the memory I pulled out sit on the desk, and just got around to selling it last week. I sold it on eBay for twice what the 64gb kit cost new. In almost 30 years of upgrading all sorts of machines, I can't remember if I've ever performed an upgrade and turned a profit out of it.
- ajnin 7mo agoThis article is using "fake" for click-bait purposes, implying some kind of scam, in fact it's just a filler RGB stick to make pretty lights inside your case, nothing nefarious about it and it's clear when you buy, but probably wouldn't be featured on HN without it.
- nubinetwork 7mo agoDummy sticks have existed since rambus as well.
- throwaway85825 7mo agoFake RAM sticks have existed since RAM became RGBified.
- ProllyInfamous 7mo agoThis seems to happen sometimes with Big Box tools, brand new out of the box: the two battery toolset will have cells from different lots (presumably:) one known to work, the other questionable... you did still get two batteries for those tools, but it sure does seem like the same one is always charging. I've had this happen both from Amazon and HD/L.
- namuol 7mo agoApropos to nothing, PC Builder Simulator on Steam costs $19.99 USD and it requires a Windows machine with just 4GB RAM and a GPU with 2GB.
- M95D 7mo agoReminds me of "fake parity" SIMM sticks.