Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
Ffs I keep delaying a rebuild of my PC because of crap like this every year thinking the bubble will burst, but something new comes up. I don’t use it for gaming nowadays, just regular browsing since I have a console but even Sony is bringing their stuff to PC so I was looking to upgrade. Now it’s been pushed even more.
Hang in there my 8 GB ram PC with GTX 960…
If you have 8gb ddr4 you can probably get a decent deal on a used 8gig stick. Even that would be quite aboost.
I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.
I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.
And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.
I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.
exactly when i needed some ram.
thank you based ai bubble, for making shit unaffordable because of spambots.
For real. I’ve been building a completely brand new computer for my husband for a couple months now. Buying a new piece each paycheck, then I get paid this week and I discover I can’t buy the RAM… It’s fucking half way finished and the only 2 parts left to buy is GPU and RAM.
Unfortunately those are the most expensive parts right now because they both require memory chips. Perhaps consider buying used, might be tough to find DDR5 DIMMs but used GPUs are plentiful.
I’m definitely looking for used parts, especially in my local classifieds. I’m going to jump on the first affordable set of ddr5 ram I can find lol
It’s sweet how much effort you’re putting into it. When I was a kid I built my first computer one piece at a time with money I saved from mowing lawns, there’s something so satisfying about earning a computer through dozens of shrewd bargains and months of dedicated labor. It’s all worth it in the end, you’ve got this!
I wonder how long ill be staying on my AM4 motherboard… those updated CPUs for gaming that AMD came out with might be my only option for a long time.
The 64GB kit I purchased Aug 2024 for $195 is now listing for $540
What market are you shopping at?!
I was told I was probably overdoing it putting 96GB in my PC a year or two ago. Be that true, but if this pricing doesn’t ease up by the time it becomes a server, my ZFS cache will love it!
This is crazy, not displaying the price of an item in a shelf or display is against consumer laws where I live. And if the price on display is not updated the store is required to sell by the price on display.
It’s blatant price-gouging. Any stock in the store has already been sold to them at an agreed price. They can set a number and make their set margin.
Updating prices after each delivery might make sense (if their procurement department is absolute dogshit at negotiating contracts), but updating prices throughout the day is just someone trying to see how hard they can push their margins to drain every cent out of their customers.
That’s probably one of those toothless laws that can be easily bypassed on a technicality. Like, just say the shelf is for “storage” and not “display”.
I swear I bought some RAM just at the start of October for reasonable prices. Did it change so quickly?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssss.
Bitch, are you surge pricing ram? Cuz it looks like you’re surge pricing ram…
That’s insane. I literally just got that same kit of memory free in a NewEgg bundle just 2 months ago! And the 32GB kits I was looking at were all priced at around $75-125 for 32GB
yep. i took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc, knowing this ai shit along with the tariffs was going to make prices bonkers af, and i needed an upgrade anyway. 8% interest on a couple grand personal loan is better than paying 4x the price in cash
took out a loan early in the year to build my new pc
Are you okay?
Yikes you’re literally financing your hobby! Better financial move is to get a used system to start with (usually a used gaming PC can be had for like $500ish, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people online you can ask for help speccing something out), squirrel away money for a couple of years (I like to keep a dedicated savings account just for big purchases like tech upgrades. $40 biweekly dissearing into another account you don’t touch is $2k every 2 years, so a 4 year complete refresh cycle for 2 people) and buy when you feel like it. Good news is it’s a small enough amount of cash to easily right the financial ship but still yikes!
Are you legitimately insane?
Love Keepa!
Isn’t this the new first party price chart Amazon is testing out?
Lived in the Silicon Valley in the 1990’s, when the price of RAM exploded with the web, armed robberies of manufacturing plants and warehouses for RAM became a thing for a few years.
Insert <Aw shit, here we go again . meme>
I think the RAM manufacturers were found to be guilty of colluding/price-fixing in that case (maybe this case too).
But now the surveillance capabilities of both the state and large corporations have been ramped up to infinity and beyond. I’m expecting a partnership announcement between Micron and Raytheon any day now, where Raytheon gets free DDR5 and Micron gets armed and autonomous security drones.
Kind of \s, kind of not
Im still running off DDR3
and feelin fine
Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.
Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.
I think that in the long run, the RAM shortage will turn into a glut of much faster and larger DDR5 RAM sticks. Provided if you can wait for the transition to AM6, an AM5 endgame system will have pretty good RAM.
They are going to pivot all that processing to the next snale oil scheme. Do you think its a coincidence that rhe AI hype came immediately after crypto crashed?
I view AI to be like the printing press: It is good for the everyman…if that everyman was willing to own and make use of it. By ceding AI to oligarchs, society would be allowing the 1% to have more tools to do stuff, while denying the public from making effective use of them.
The answer isn’t to reject AI, but to fund publicly developed and owned AI. Every minority who has 95% of Disney’s legal acumen in their pocket, will be able to more effectively resist Kavenaugh Stops in court. An AI can scour the web and spot discounted goods that a person actually wants, and create a shopping list that is cheap and convenient. People can have a competent teacher, if their rural household lacks a school. All these things lend a little extra agency to ordinary people.
My point, is that we shouldn’t refuse tools. Instead, we should adopt them on OUR terms, not the techbro’s.
I have a similar perspective. I built my own in-home AI server because I assumed if the technology had any staying power, I better learn how it works to some degree and see if I can run it myself.
This assumes machine learning models are able to get better than they currently are. Newer models have been plateauing in quality of outputs (improvements have been noticable in video and image generation, but even that is slowing down)
I don’t think we’re going to see machine learning models that perform well enough to create printing press level change to the world
LoL, LLM’s aren’t capable of being “competent” at anything. Not law, not teaching, not even coding. They are pure garbage at nearly everything they are applied to. Yes, some of these things have had some limited success at finding patterns in the noise. But those successes are grossly outweighed by the absolute failure of them to do anything else.
https://tech.co/news/list-ai-failures-mistakes-errors
AI is an technology, and like any technology, it improves. The AI we had two years ago was something akin to the Orville flier, the ones we have now are equivalent of a biplane. Those examples of technology weren’t very useful, but the planes that followed were far more capable and economical.
Your assertions that AI is useless, is merely burying your head in the sand and hoping things will go alright. The outright refusal of AI by people like you, only ensures the most evil people can use it. This is like only allowing Nazis to own guns, peasants not being allowed to own land, or newspapers to only be owned by the wealthiest.
It is power that you are giving up, and power doesn’t care about who has it.
Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if LLMs aren’t useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, its been shown that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn’t make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.
Now, you might say “oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work”, but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that’s not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?
So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven’t been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?
Currently I’m of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don’t have much optimism for other use cases.
Guess I should have bought the 128GB 3600 kit earlier.
Are DDR4 also affected?Ddr4 is apparently out of manufacturing at a lot of places now, so it’s even more affected (at least in my market, prices rose more then ddr5)
Yeah, just checked the 2 sites I use for computer components.
1 had no RAM listed.
The other had 32GB DDR4 at 2x the price and no 128GB kit (96 was the highest, 64 for DDR4)I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.
Speaking as someone with 128gb DDR4 3600 RAM and uses mid-size AI like GLM Air, it is too slow to have much fun with. I suspect that a lot of hobbyists will adopt and discard DDR4 in short order, so you can probably get a good deal if you buy used.
Sadly I am not in a location where people just discard useful parts.
If I were to try buying 2nd hand here, I would most probably end up with stuff that has some or the other kind of of damage.For instance, in one of the companies I worked at, their policy for getting rid of stuff was:
- If unneeded but working, then send to another department
- If malfunctioning but fixable, get it fixed
- If not worth fixing, then auction it off
- HDDs? repurpose or shred
And the auctions occurred years later after much red tape…
Mostly bought by other companies, who get to do more red-tape stuff to buy it.While on one hand, this is a good thing, reducing wastage, it also means that I have no way to get 2nd hand stuff for hobbyist usage.
In case we do get 2nd hand stuff, it is usually through a 2nd hand dealer, who then ends up with a higher asking price than what it’s worth.
Also, I am not expecting there to be any AI enthusiast nearby me.
