“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 $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
Genuine question here, for a “normal” computer user, say somebody who :
- browses the Web
- listens to music, play videos, etc
- sometimes plays video games, even 2025 AAAs and already has a GPU relatively recent and midrange, say something from e.g. 2020
- even codes something of a normal size, let’s say up to Firefox size (which is huge)
… which task does require more than say 32Go?
You probably dont but 32gb ddr5 is minimum 200$ right now for the slowest.
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.
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soon the bubble will burst and RAM will be so cheap! (I hope)
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€.
RAM used to cost 8x that. It’s the reason why HP cases have locks.
Far as RAM goes, it will become a good thing: it gives companies incentive to invest into the development of bigger RAM, more speed, and making the motherboard bandwidth big enough to handle it.
The next big generation of hardware will be much better IMO, simply because the companies will have to compete by their merits. The downside is not having enough supply right now, but once the logistics and tech is in place, even non-AI people will benefit.
No, it won’t. The DRAM market is dominated by three companies, and they’ve colluded before. They get their wrist slapped by some government body, they promise not to do it again, and then they wait a few years and do it again.
They’ll also have an electrical outage the millisecond demand starts to go down, so they’ll have to sell the old stock at inflated prices first before restarting production, oopsie-woopsie
The downside is not having enough supply right now, but once the logistics and tech is in place, even non-AI people will benefit.
Have you forgotten that they agreed to reduce production to stabilize prices? Capacity is not the real bottleneck.
God fucking damn it… Now they want our RAM?!
I need that for all my Chrome tabs and pet protogen, you fucking clankers!
Who’s bewildered? Of course this was going to happen. Everything enjoyable about life is being ruined. It’s not surprising at all.
Wow I just checked the laptop kit I bought a month ago it is 50% more
Dang, now i know why micron stock has gone wild.
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 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.
Just curious, what do you actually use which requires more than 32Go?
I always thought ram of different speeds worked together, they just were run at the speed of the slowest stick.
In theory yes. In practice it depends on how finicky your motherboard is.
AI increases my power utility bill
AI takes my water
AI increases the price of GPUs
AI increases the price of RAM
AI makes my search results worse and slower
AI is inserted into every website, app, program, and service making them all worseAll so businesses and companies can increase productivity, reduce staff, and then turn around and increase prices to customers.
All so businesses and companies can increase productivity, reduce staff, and then turn around and increase prices to customers.
As if. The only thing AI is to businesses is a lost bet. And they don’t like losing. So they’re betting even more, hoping some shiny “AGI” starts existing if they throw enough money into wasting other resources onto the AI bandwagon.
Lets not also forget that for a bunch of them, they want to completely replace lightning fast, simple UI with AI so they don’t need their own programmers, and your experience doing things is outright painful.
Isn’t capitalism a blast?
Right, what you said, but I’d remove the part where it increases productivity.
It’s a win-win with staff layoffs. Businesses that want to lay people off have a convenient scapegoat and AI companies receive undeserved praise.
A win-win for everyone but the employees, of course.
Seriously. The amount of time spent handholding the AIs no one asked to use more than offsets any supposed productivity gains.
IMHO, most people’s time usage perception tends to be heavilly skewed toward weighing higher the time taken in the main task - say, creating the code of a program - rather than the secondary (but, none the less, required before completion) tasks like fixing the code.
Notice how so many coders won’t do the proper level of analysis and preparation before actually starting coding - they want to feel like they’re “doing the work” which for them is the coding part, whilst the analysis doesn’t feel like “doing the work” for a dev, so they prematurelly dive into coding and end up screwed with things like going down a non-viable implementation route or missing in the implementation some important requirement detail with huge implications on the rest that would have been detected during analysis.
(I also think that’s the reason why even without AI people will do stupid “time savers” in the main task like using short variable names that then screw them in secondary tasks like bug-fixing or adding new requirements to the program later because it makes it far harder to figure out what the code is doing)
AI speeds up what people feel is the main task - creating the code - but that’s de facto more than offset by time lost on supposedly secondary work that doesn’t feel as much as “doing the work” so doesn’t get counted the same.
This is why when it actually gets measured independently and properly by people who aren’t just trusting their own feeling of “how long did it took” (or people who, thanks to experience, actually do properly measure the total time taken including in support activities, rather than just trusting their own subjective perception) it turns out that, at least in software development, AI actually slightly reduces productivity.
Yeah I am beyond ready for the next new fad.
Cannabilism.
The next fad will be Thunderdome. Are you ready to go beyond that?
Nice article but the numbers are a lot lower here in the EU.
While there is some pricing increase it’s currently more around 50% and not 100%.
The selected kit is also extremely expensive (350€ was ~300€) - similar kits are available for a lot less (270€ was ~180€) - so I doubt that anyone was buying it in the first place.
I also think it’s not completely AI related but more likely that this is another RAM price fixing scandal happening right now. Pretty much the same that we see today happend in 2017-2018.
Europe is also hit hard. The kit I was about to buy increased from 850 to 2K euro…
Bruh, my whole mid-to-high range gaming PC costs 850 to 2K euro. What is the intended use of such an expensive RAM kit? Is it LLMs again?
Scientific applications. My lab has a PC running 196GB RAM for processing 3D and 4D microscopy voxel datasets.
Assuming that you don’t need the absolute tightest timings and highest speed, you can get 192 GB from Corsair for “just” 660 euros where I live, pretty far still from 2000 euros. The speed and timings are the same as the 1300 euro kit, also from Corsair, it’s just that the cheaper kit has no RGB.
So at 2k EUR I’m assuming it’s going to be either more than 192 GB (in which case, is that even a desktop motherboard or are we talking about servers?) or some super high speed RAM.
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 when “Chia coin” came for our HDDs too?
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hard-drive-prices-skyrocket-asia-scalpers-making-bank
next the tech-bros will come for you and there will be nobody left to speak up.
Laughs in ddr4…
Im still gaming on a 15 year old cpu and ddr3, lol. Playing a decent amount of new games. Only one that wont run is alan wake 2 and that may be because of linux .
Amd fx 8 core.
It also got affected.
Is DDR3 affected too?
God fucking damnit, can’t I even be poor in peace, JFC!
People buying RAM: oh no, what do we do?
People buying GPUs: first time?
Those are the same people.
What?
You think this is the first ram crunch?
It’s not even the first one in this decade…
Well, I was aware RAM prices fluctuate.
I’ve never been so unfortunate when buying larger RAM, or building a new system with a new DDR version.
They don’t real fluctuate, it’s more oscillating.
Sometimes it’s “normal” but due to a wide range of issues that can change quickly and stay that way for months because everyone waits till prices go down. So as they go down, people stop waiting,
just pop already
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.
