32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/32gb-of-ddr5-now-costs-usd375-minimum-ai-shortage-continues-to-squeeze-pc-building

by papersail • 2 months ago

436 393 2 months ago

tomshardware.com

Forgeties792• 2 months ago

Honestly that seems slightly down even if it’s still ridiculous. The ram I bought for $100 a year ago was $500 a couple of months ago. Could just be the particular sticks I got though

john_strinlai• 2 months ago

$375 is the cheapest kit, and the price is using a promo code

"Price tracking courtesy of PCPartPicker now reveals the cheapest 32GB DDR5 RAM you can buy is $375. Specifically, four XPOWER kits from Silicon Power will set you back $374.97 thanks to a promo code."

Forgeties792• 2 months ago

that’s what I get for not clicking through TFA

moomoo11• 2 months ago

i have 128gb ddr4 from a few years ago. i think i paid like 300-400 for it.

its paired to a 5950x so im sure it will be fine for a few more years

swiftcoder2• 2 months ago

One would think the CPU prices would drop as RAM crunches PC sales, but apparently not

axegon_• 2 months ago

"The costs are negligible and justified when compared to all the benefits. If you look at the performance gains, the overall cost has in fact been reduced."

- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.

fhdkweig• 2 months ago

I haven't watched those movies in a while. Can I get an explanation on those a.k.a.s?

z24• 2 months ago

I remember both, the former is positive but suffers from short-term memory loss. the latter is always afraid of things, and also seems to never learn.

Scene_Cast2• 2 months ago

This is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.

fullstop• 2 months ago

I regret not building the PC when I was looking at it. It's not a money thing, at the end of the day, but I can't bring myself to do it.

I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.

My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)

chrismorgan• 2 months ago

Similar situation—just as I was about to buy, an emergency occurred, and when I came back two months later my ₹1,00,000 build was ₹1,20,000, and I felt I couldn’t quite justify it any more. And after all, my laptop had stabilised and no longer seemed to be dying like it had been a year earlier. Well, now my build would be ₹1,75,000 and feeling even less justified.

ajam1507• 2 months ago

Pre-built PCs are the way to get a deal right now. The price of individual components is much more expensive than buying something from Micro Center or one of the Chinese integrators.

snkline• 2 months ago

The memory in the PC I put together early last year is now worth about three times the total cost of all the parts I used to build the thing. It is absolutely crazy.

expedition32• 2 months ago

You could get a 990pro 2 terabyte Samsung SSD for €150 just last year. Memory had become a commodity product.

at-fates-hands• 2 months ago

I'm still flying under the radar with a Dell Precision T5820. 128GB of DDR4 and a Quadro P4000 graphics card (8gb). Handles everything I need it to do including photo/video editing, and some random FPS games without any issues.

I was thinking of upgrading the video card to something better, but looking at the cost of replacing that Quadro? I might just stay put for now. Costs on those have also pretty much doubled.

david422• 2 months ago

I put together a new PC last year and got some extra memory, because why not. Crazy how much that would cost me today.

ChiperSoft• 2 months ago

Yesterday I did a price check on the PC I built two years ago. It went from $2300 to $3650. The bulk of that increase was that the ram went from $210 to $940. Its now more expensive than when DDR5 was new.

christoph• 2 months ago

I bought a 5090 12 months ago, just checked - that’s basically up 50%! I used to joke i’d retire on all the old tech in my loft, everyday now it feels less like a joke!

shepherdjerred• 2 months ago

Those are rookie numbers

https://stocks.sjer.red/

wing-_-nuts3• 2 months ago

The value of my desktop pc has almost doubled, my ps5 is worth ~ $150 more than I bought it years ago.

It's gotten to the point where nvidia doesn't even bother to report their gaming revenue anymore. It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby, but don't worry I'm sure nvidia and their ilk are salivating at the idea of making pc gaming into a streaming stadia like solution that you pay for monthly

ls612• 2 months ago

I bought my 4090 at MSRP three years ago and now used 4090s are selling for 50%+ above what I paid.

KeplerBoy3• 2 months ago

At least it seems to not get worse.

turpentine3• 2 months ago

It shows 3.5" spinning rust are climbing this year too.

leosanchez• 2 months ago

We are cooked tbh.

3uler• 2 months ago

Makes the Framework Desktop look like a bargain.

brnaftr361• 2 months ago

GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

babypuncher• 2 months ago

Who needs an economy built on consumer spending when a handful of massive tech companies can just keep passing around the same trillion dollar check like a hot potato?

zargon2• 2 months ago

Consumer oriented parts businesses are going to go out of business from this. Motherboards, cases, coolers, power supplies, fans, etc. At this point it's a matter of how many. Selection and competition will be permanently reduced, as I don't see these types of companies coming back any time soon.

gwerbin• 2 months ago

Oopsie I guess a few big industry giants need to step in to fulfill the demand. It's not technically an illegal monopoly if all the small players just so happen to go out of business!

tetris11• 2 months ago

isnt this where China would typically step in?

mcmcmc• 2 months ago

The knee jerk gamer reaction that everything will be pushed to cloud gaming I think is unrealistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see higher end workstations or gaming PCs move to a leasing model or something like carrier subsidized smartphones, where you lock into a contract with an upgrade cycle

4k0hz• 2 months ago

I doubt it. Desktops don't add substantial hardware features often or get damaged in the same way phones do.

Keyframe• 2 months ago

Can we just go back to pre-AI world?

okokwhatever• 2 months ago

Can we just go back to pre-{anything-here} world?

dijit2• 2 months ago

gigabit internet and the death of flash for web video has been wonderful to be honest.

There was a period in 2012-2016 when things were pretty nice.

pezgrande3• 2 months ago

good way to get us a in a singularity

z24• 2 months ago

This is textbook negative externalities, of the AI buildout on everyone who isn't using RAM/GPUs for AI, of the use of electricity and water on anyone who isn't using it for AI. The cynic in me thinks this will go down in history alongside asbestos, leaded gasoline/paint, and the opioid crisis.

WarmWash• 2 months ago

People want this, the demand is there.

Like clockwork, people naturally want to have their cake and to eat it too, so there will be the incessant complaining about the externalities. Half the people lack the brainpower to see the good and bad are intrinsically linked, and the other half just like complaining.

But at least for now, both halves aren't pulling back (in fact it's increasing), and money, not complaining, steers the ship.

Permit• 2 months ago

The cynic in me thinks this will go down in history alongside asbestos, leaded gasoline/paint, and the opioid crisis.

Can you elaborate? Leaded gasoline is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of like tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Asbestos probably millions.

Why would high RAM prices be remembered alongside these events?

whizzter3• 2 months ago

It'll calm down once the Antrophic and/or OpenAI IPO's are done, no need to protect themselves from people running local models by buying everything once the bosses have gotten their money.

pizza234• 2 months ago

OpenAI and Anthropic are certainly strong drivers, but there's a large demand from many other players: cloud provider, accelerator vendors, and so on. I think there's no end in sight.

deltoidmaximus3• 2 months ago

AMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.

dijit2• 2 months ago

Shame I have 2TiB of ECC DDR4 lying around :(

Would be nice to be able to own property.

varispeed4• 2 months ago

People used to mock "you'll own nothing" as conspiracy theory.

Hamuko4• 2 months ago

You can probably get a mansion in France for that.

arjie2• 2 months ago

Better to get rid of that stuff now unless it’s fast. You can get used 2666 DDR4 for about $200/64 GiB stick.

onli2• 2 months ago

Nice, I missed that.

The 5700X3D has been the smarter pick back then, it fits to the current latent user hostility of AMD to focus on the more expensive processor.

silon42• 2 months ago

They need to sell something. I bet sales of DDR5 related stuff are down.

KeplerBoy3• 2 months ago

That's literally the same chip. With pricing being whatever, who cares which one they revive.

qingcharles5• 2 months ago

Everyone re-releasing their old crap. Nvidia is remaking the 3060 too I believe because they can use cheaper older RAM on it.

MegaDeKay• 2 months ago

I know what you're meaning but the 5800X3D is still a beast of a gaming CPU. It remains a great option for AM4 gaming.

vablings• 2 months ago

It's not even "old crap" the PC consumer market has basically died in less than year due to your average person getting priced out, I cannot imagine how catastrophic of an impact this is going to have on younger folk and the barrier to entry to desktop computing

sidewndr46• 2 months ago

I'm just waiting for Zhaoxin to break into the international market with something

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

So I have some DDR4 RAM that I should probably just sell because I've looked multiple times at building an AM4 PC and it's just not worth it. These parts originate from a PC where the temps were high and I wanted to redo the thermal grease and ended up breaking the motherboard and unfortunately I bent the pins in the CPU too (5800XT). Bending the pins was dumb.

Anyway, I just can't find a reason to build an AM4 PC even though the RAM is "free". It's just not worth it. If you need 64GB+ of RAM and the DDR4 vs DDR5 difference isn't significant to you then maybe it's worth it. Otherwise, you can still buy a 32GB DDR5 PC for similar prices to last year sometimes. It's not worth buying any AM4 CPU then the 7500X3D/7600X3D/7800X3D are so much better for the same price.

The 5800X3D re-release is kinda funny. AMD claims they had to do significant re-engineering but it is my understanding they stopped selling it in the US but were still selling it overseas. So did production really stop? Anyway, the price seems to be $349. If so, that's completely not worth it. It's the same price as the 7800X#D, which is significantly better.

As an example, here's a 7800X3D + motherboard + 32GB DDR5 bundle you can buy today for $629 if you happen to live near a Micro Center [1]. No AM4 option is going to compete with that, particularly not with a $349 CPU.

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/5007391/amd-ryzen-7-7800...

usui• 2 months ago

I looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!

qingcharles5• 2 months ago

I was picking up DDR3 16GB sticks for $5/piece on eBay last year. The world has gone mad.

Hamuko4• 2 months ago

To be fair, DDR3 is still kinda cheap. It's really only DDR4 and DDR5 that are massively in demand. DDR3 is a bit too old for it to be in high demand by consumers.

seltzered_• 2 months ago

My anecdata: bought used DDR4 ECC 16gb ram sticks (i.e. serverpulled ram) for $11 off ebay last year (Jan 2025), now as of June 2026 the lowest listing I see is $42, most are around $50.

When I bought the same ECC DDR4 16gb ram stick in 2016 (when DDR4 was rather new) it cost $85 (cant remember if it was new or used)

frankieg33• 2 months ago

that was a great deal.

$86.30 for my 32gb DDR4 3200 stick Oct 2022. So glad I bought that. I have a mini-itx board and one of the ram slots died so i was forced to upgrade to a single stick. the historic trend of price deflation in computer components has always had me leaning toward not upgrading my set up.

fortunately all i play now are "premium" web browser games like narrow.one and eggball, ha! going to be hurting when GTA 6 launches with my 3050/1070 gpus...

thijson• 2 months ago

Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.

mgfist2• 2 months ago

A fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build.

It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money

cute_boi• 2 months ago

Sometime I wish China had capacity to manufacture RAM. They would build fab within 1 year..

danaris3• 2 months ago

It will only happen if the bottom doesn't fall out of the market for AI datacenters in the next few months.

pezgrande3• 2 months ago

$20B is like pocket money at the scale the whole industry is moving.

nemomarx• 2 months ago

So far haven't we seen the opposite? Consumer focused ram production shutting down to make more volume for server dimms or etc?

fluoridation3• 2 months ago

The bottleneck isn't the sticks, it's the chips. The chips are the same for consumer and server applications. What's been happening is that big companies have bought nearly all the wafer capacity for the next year or so, and perhaps some of that capacity has also been redirected from DDR5 to LPDDR5. If a stick manufacturer drops out of the consumer market that kinda doesn't matter, because manufacturing sticks is relatively low tech compared to manufacturing the memory chips. You can compare it to manufacturing video cards vs. manufacturing GPUs (as in the actual processing elements).

layer84• 2 months ago

What do you mean? RAM manufacturers shifting their capacities to server RAM and HBM is exactly what’s happening.

ecshafer2• 2 months ago

Government needs to get out of the way. Micron announced a memory fab in Syracuse in 2023. It took 3 years, 20,000 pages of "environmental review", deals with the government on amount of union contracts during building, etc. for them to break ground in 2026 for a 2030 opening date. In any reasonable world, a 2023 announcement should have broke ground in 2023.

Shitty-kitty4• 2 months ago

Buddy they ain't building an ice-cream parlor. 200 miles of the Hudson river is a Superfund site. The biggest polluters, PCB's, lead and mercury.

otherme123• 2 months ago

OTOH, a celulose factory near me, built in the 1950's, got their permits fast and with little regard to environment. FF three decades, and their entire surroundings are destoyed for everyone else. Trials go nowhere, because they have all authorizations needed (and a lot of political leverage because they are the main employer in the region). Careful fast-tracking business that have zero incentives to avoid externalization of costs.

zouhair• 2 months ago

Oh, yeah, we are in this calamity because of government interference, not unbridled capitalism. Sure.

wahern6• 2 months ago

Several Chinese manufacturers are doing just that, and have already expanded production: https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c... But because of tech trade barriers their primary focus is on the domestic market and only secondarily global markets.

9cb14c1ec0• 2 months ago

Fortunately RAM is largely a commodity and more for sale only in China means more for sale elsewhere.

varispeed4• 2 months ago

Why manufacturers would build more capacity to decrease the price (and profits)?

This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.

It will be a bit of Catch 22.

amanaplanacanal• 2 months ago

Theoretically if you can build more capacity you can take customers from your competitors. If you don't really have competitors that doesn't work so well.

Rp8yXmdmr• 2 months ago

We are down to 3 manufacturers thanks to RAM boom and bust cycles. The remaining ones are the one that know how not to over invest.

layer84• 2 months ago

With China’s CXMT and YMTC it’s now going to be five again.

tayo42• 2 months ago

Take your ram budget, buy micron stock, wait a few days, sell it and buy ram lol

swiftcoder2• 2 months ago

I bought 64GB of DDR4 in December of '24. Best timing-the-market of my life.

alecsm• 2 months ago

Same thing with storage.

I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.

hstaab3• 2 months ago

Settle for a modest 2TB and spend the rest on ice cream during your rides.

dawnerd• 2 months ago

Even spinning metal has gone through the roof even on refurb and server pulls.

turpentine3• 2 months ago

I have to wonder if some online stores have been drip selling stock, trying to sell at the top of the market. A few extra $k on thousands of units from a day-to-day price change is probably tempting for small pc part businesses.

amarcheschi• 2 months ago

getting a road bike is understated, at least where i live it is so nice to roam around outisde cities with just a few cars around

ajsnigrutin• 2 months ago

"back in my time", a dialup and 32 megs(!) of ram was enough for most stuff, including internet browsing.

I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc.

Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore.

edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.

Fnoord• 2 months ago

250 EUR (that is with VAT for 2x16 GB DDR4 [1] seems like a fair price.

[1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...

KronisLV• 2 months ago

Crazy, the other day I looked in my local store order history and say that I bought G.SKILL RipJaws V F4-3600C18D-32GVK, a DDR4 32 GB 3600 MHz kit of two sticks.

I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation.

Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).

functionmouse3• 2 months ago

I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.

sixothree4• 2 months ago

I played 100+ hours of RDR2 on a 2060 (non-super), as was the style at the time. When the 30 series came out, I sold that card for more than I paid for it.

deaton2• 2 months ago

I've got a 9 year old Xeon W and 64GB of DDR4. Its not as fast as some modern DDR5 stuff, but boy does it work

stuxnet792• 2 months ago

Some might call this a boomer build but the 4790k is an absolute beast of a CPU and still holds up.

arjie2• 2 months ago

I recently booted up an old 4790k system and it was fine on Linux but on Windows it would nag me to update but apparently the CPU is too old for new Windows. I ended up giving it away on the Internet to whomever could pick up but afterwards it ended up with one of those reseller chaps. Ah well, I wish it had made to some kid somewhere.

antonyt• 2 months ago

I got a 4700k in 2013 for 200 bucks from Microcenter. The thing has been continuously in service ever since. It's my "homelab" box now.

voidUpdate• 2 months ago

2080? I'm still using a 1070. That thing rocks

hstaab3• 2 months ago

1070 as well. Probably one of the best ROIs from a single component

mrec• 2 months ago

<FourYorkshiremen>Luxury.</FourYorkshiremen> I'm still using a 1650 Super with 4GB VRAM and it's basically fine. Holding off on a few newer titles, but I'm old and my eyesight is going so 1080 resolution is plenty for me.

robertkarl• 2 months ago

it's also a capable local inference stack!

ragequittah3• 2 months ago

Here I'm on a 5800x and a 4070ti super and it's woefully inadequate for some games. Though I suppose if you play at 1080p (which is hard to look at these days for me) you might be OK on low-medium settings in some newer games. I can't see you getting very far with something like Forza Horizon 6 or Death Stranding 2 though.

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

Brother, I'm on a 3070 Ti and I can play basically all games at full settings at 1900x1200 resolution. I've only found one game where I had to turn the settings down (Talos Principle 2). Most games aren't really demanding.

drnick15• 2 months ago

Presumably, this is at 1080p, which looks terrible after you experienced 4K. It's better than nothing, and I probably wouldn't build a 4K rig in this market, but let's not pretend you can get a modern gaming experience out of that old hardware.

TheAmazingRace2• 2 months ago

In my humble opinion, 4K gaming is rather overrated. I find high refresh rates at 1440p to be the sweet spot and you don't have to get a top-end GPU to drive it at ultra settings in games.

hinata083• 2 months ago

I went back to fanless PCs on DDR3 to build personal servers as well, while my laptop to go to conventions will remain that old Fujitsu lifebook thing with more tape

AI bros are building something fantastic, but let's not forget that value isn't necessarily brought by sheer prices

api• 2 months ago

This is insane. Didn’t know how bad it got. I bought a mini PC a few years ago with 64 gigs in it for a home VM server for like $600 total. Looks like I’m keeping it a while.

Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.

Hamuko4• 2 months ago

It was just yesterday that SK Hynix announced to double their capacity over the next five years.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-...

whizzter3• 2 months ago

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened.

Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

varispeed4• 2 months ago

that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling

they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.

fluoridation3• 2 months ago

Honestly, that's the output I get from non-local models, anyway. If I'm going to get plausible nonsense either way, I may as well run it on my own hardware.

cogman102• 2 months ago

They are actually quite a bit better than you might think. Qwen3.6 27B is pretty capable at coding.

For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.

After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.

throw12345678913• 2 months ago

I get results comparable to the saas. Maybe Anthropic sold you too much crack tokens.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

isn't that literally all output an LLM generates?

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

That's all LLMs can give you anyway.

Hamuko4• 2 months ago

My bet is that we're not gonna see any adjustments in RAM pricing until one of the planned data center projects collapses in a spectacular way.

sixothree4• 2 months ago

And honestly, we will have much bigger problems if that bubble pops in a spectacular fashion.

rvnx2• 2 months ago

One theory: they will need to throw away all these Nvidia cards in the trash at some point right ?

Because what to do with power-consuming outdated hardware ? let's say 5 years from now ?

They will need new RAM.

I wonder.

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

The billionaires locked in a race to spend effectively unlimited funds on AI CapEx will have to be convinced by markets and/or their advisers that there aren't enough profits and that cutting losses (like with Metaverse) in their quixotic quest is necessary.

elAhmo2• 2 months ago

You are saying there will be even more demand for RAM and that will cause the prices to crash?

gaigalas2• 2 months ago

Perhaps all hobbyst developers interested in local AI combined is a smaller demand than AI companies hoarding parts. That would make demand decrease.

andriy_koval• 2 months ago

The chance is that they cache out during IPO, and will lose interest to increase capacity, some/many contracts will be canceled, and demand being reduced.

fleventynine3• 2 months ago

If local models are good enough, doesn't that increase demand for DRAM as everyone buys DRAM for their poorly utilized local machines?

Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.

szatkus• 2 months ago

Luckily very few people can configure and are interested in local models. But your nearby datacenter running Chinese open-weight models is also good enough.

adornKey• 2 months ago

But remember that markets can stay irrational longer than anyone can hold his breath. If they get more funding there's a good chance they'll invest more in the destruction of the remaining production capacity. Admitting that with normal pricing anyone could have a decent AI-machine for 2K is hard - prices for acceptable AI-machines most likely will go >10K first.

zepearl• 2 months ago

This...

Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling...

...plus the recent price increases by AI companies, made me actually think the opposite: that there might be another additional "run" for memory and/or GPUs.

Therefore, yesterday I decided to order an additional RTX 5060 with 16 GiB VRAM for the ~500$ that I saved during the last months (to be added to the RTX 5070 12 GiB that I bought last year to play games in 4k + my old RTX 3060 12 GiB which I recycled a few months ago after noticing how nice it is to run llama.cpp locally without having to worry about subscription costs).

The original 24 GiB VRAM were actually quite enough for some of the stuff that I do (e.g. transcribe text of image scans of old magazines, coding with Aider, etc - I usually use Q5_K_M quantizations of Qwen & Gemma by Bartowski as lower ones delivered sometimes weird results and/or looped forever in "thinking"-mode), but I guess that with 40 GiB I should be bullet-proof for my pessimistic view of our future :o)

matheusmoreira• 2 months ago

Crazy... I hope this is temporary. If this is the new normal, we're all going to be priced out of computers eventually.

maztaim2• 2 months ago

If the industry had a say, we will be priced out. Look at the nvidia dgx spark. This is going to be the new norm if they have their way.

ChrisLTD• 2 months ago

What's the theory of the conspiracy here?

snarfy• 2 months ago

I am counting my blessings after updating my and my wife's gaming PCs right before all of this happened.

SirFatty2• 2 months ago

Not just AI, tariffs also affect price.

elAhmo2• 2 months ago

RAM is used outside of the US as well.

SirFatty2• 2 months ago

Really? Wow, thanks for that!

tonyrice2• 2 months ago

At one point I remember DDR2 ECC coating like $150-$180

Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.

doubled112• 2 months ago

Everything is relative.

I thought 128MB of SDRAM was a good deal at $100.

I also thought $479 for 32GB of DDR4 was nuts back in 2016/2017.

tonyrice2• 2 months ago

Everything is relative.

That makes me realize how much of society, economics and our nature is really like a current, ripples in a big ol ocean. Supply and demand baby.

HumblyTossed• 2 months ago

While back I recalled I had 16GB of DDR4 somewhere. I went and found it in an old bin box. It's now in my safe in case I need it for a machine.

This is the stupidest freaking timeline...

flr03• 2 months ago

Just looked for my order receipt out of curiosity, this was in Jan 23: £160 for Kingston FURY Renegade 32GB (16GB x 2) 6000MT/s DDR5 CL32 DIMM Silver

icedchai2• 2 months ago

Pretty insane. I built a Framework Desktop PC back in November. The motherboard (with 128G DDR5 RAM) was $1800. Now it's $2859. Almost 60% increase in 6 months.

nerdjon3• 2 months ago

I am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot.

I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.

The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.

keyringlight• 2 months ago

The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.

name_concept• 2 months ago

To me, this is just one more thing that makes the current times we live in "not fun".

flobosg• 2 months ago

8G ought to be enough for anybody.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

This but unironically. As long as "anybody" means "any developer dogfooding their own program"

randusername• 2 months ago

I want a more complete picture of why prices are so high from articles like this.

Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?

I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.

ambicapter• 2 months ago

Memory makers are reluctant to increase fabrication (high cost of capital and boom/bust cycle leads to bankruptcies being common in the industry), and the memory required for AI (HBM) requires more of the production inputs than other types of RAM, thus squeezing regular DDR RAM even more. Long-form article describing this in more detail: https://davidoks.blog/p/ai-is-killing-the-cheap-smartphone

pjc502• 2 months ago

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it.

It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer...

The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.

simonsarris• 2 months ago

It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy.

I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more) years of pricing pain. Meanwhile expensive RAM has so far left stock for people that really need it. Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy

I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone.

Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers? The number is so small that it's a rounding error. Many examples like this where we see headlines about some part going up in price and forget that it's such a negligible piece of our bill that it barely matters.

The cost of fuel inputs for base generation and peak supply are a bigger factor.

SlinkyOnStairs2• 2 months ago

Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages?

Both. AI datacenters create immense demand on DRAM, NAND storage, even HDD storage.

Then Sam Altman went ahead and "bought" 40% of the world's DRAM production, by way of secretly approaching both Samsung and SK Hynix (each unaware of the other getting a similar deal), which sent the entire market into a panic and everyone rushed to buy ahead of the anticipated supply shortage.

The kicker is that it wasn't even a proper purchase agreement. Just a non-binding promise of "By 2030 I will have infinite dollars and buy your DRAM".

JohnTHaller• 2 months ago

Supply is constrained. AI bought up so much that we're seeing wafer shortages. Absurd US tariffs messed with stuff. And we're just getting started.

CheeseOnFries• 2 months ago

I've taken advantage of this.. Over the last 6 months I actually made money on my old PC parts inventory, but don't plan on buying any new hardware anytime soon.

lionkor4• 2 months ago

I built a little home server last year, and only put 32 of the total 64 GB I wanted. The rationale was that RAM is cheap, and I could spend that month's fun budget on a 8TB harddrive instead.

Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.

gvalkov• 2 months ago

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on.

Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(

zozbot2343• 2 months ago

If you don't need the full memory bandwidth of DDR5 for any particular application area, the best solution is probably just to add flash storage for mostly read-only data and Intel Optane (still sold in the secondary market at around $1/GB) for write-heavy scratchpad space. The latter gives you around DDR3ish performance at a higher power draw than DRAM or modern flash, but its wearout-resistance and lower latency compared to flash still matters.

Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs.

That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.

9x39• 2 months ago

That’s about right, sadly. We were buying servers with 1TB DDR5 standard, no longer.

Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.

ocdtrekkie• 2 months ago

I got quoted $4K, $6K, and $8K for the same enterprise SSD part in three different quotes within about a week. (I normally expect this part to be $1.5-2.5K.) In one case, a storage array with two SSDs in it cost approximately the same as buying those two SSDs standalone.

When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.

Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.

giancarlostoro2• 2 months ago

I still believe that Mark Zuckerberg would have been smarter investing all his AI funding into just making RAM fabs. Would probably have printed easy cash. Instead he's burning cash on making IG / FB less secure because of his in-house AI.

throwaway67678• 2 months ago

That would require having actual technological flair beyond 'buying potential competitors'

throwway1203853• 2 months ago

Mine the miners.

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

€200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs

That's about 50% higher than you'd pay for retail, small quantity, off the shelf alternatives in the US.

Many vendors have limited allocation so they're sending out extremely high quotes to see who will take it. They know everyone is seeing news about high RAM prices and getting new vendors approved can be hard, so they raise prices and see who takes it.

I would recommend getting quotes from multiple vendors. Don't be afraid to push back. They might come back immediately with a lower price in this market. Also check the retail suppliers you can access in your country.

a2tech• 2 months ago

I’m just working with an EDA client to upgrade their almost decade old machines to run the cadence tools…it’s grim. Real real grim. I was pricing out servers this morning with 64gb(!) of RAM for almost 20k. The machines were running now, some of them have almost a terabyte of RAM. I think the designers are just going to have to suck it up and use the slower machines

theandrewbailey5• 2 months ago

Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs

I sell used RAM in trays of 50 sticks (I physically know how much that is, I've held that many). I've had some trays sell for a few thousand dollars. Six figures for just one tray is absurd, but I've never collected enough DDR5 to make a full tray.

brandensilva• 2 months ago

Micron is building a factory near me but it's years out.

The only hope here is China floods the market which would be a good or bad thing however you look at it.

az226• 2 months ago

Getting a few sticks today is cheaper than volume. Who wants volume has the pockets to pay for volume. It’s a rare reverse wholesale premium instead of discount.

butz• 2 months ago

Time to migrate all those electron "native" apps to actual native code. I bet with some decent optimizations 4GB will be more than enough for casual user, and still with some free memory to spare.

hinata083• 2 months ago

it's more than casual users used to have, and most still do the same activities even decades after 2GB were enough

weather forecast wasn't more rainy on a 2005 windows PC or an early smartphone in 2G to save battery

FHD streaming has worked for decades now

The plot of animes was still enjoyable on DVD

Progress is important, but some companies don't realise how customers don't need it when it's twice their pay

boredinstapanda• 2 months ago

Man, I remember my first 8MB cost over $400.

glouwbug2• 2 months ago

It’s time to bring back all the old software hacks that were so common in the 90s

layer84• 2 months ago

Like SoftRAM? ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM

glouwbug2• 2 months ago

They’d have killed today if they were AI first

Magi604• 2 months ago

Here's another data point for you all. Last year in April 2025 I bought 32gb DDR5 at $123.69. I checked it this most recent April and the exact same product was $679. All prices in Canadian dollars.

mpweiher• 2 months ago

Maybe we can start to become a little less profligate with our memory usage.

There certainly is lots and lots of potential.

elric• 2 months ago

How much of is this is actually due to the AI hype cycle, and what's the impact of the global energy clusterfuck that is the Strait of Hormuz?

tjwebbnorfolk• 2 months ago

DRAM prices were in the stratosphere late last year, pre-dating the Iran war by 4+ months.

jaynetics• 2 months ago

Yeah, the prices are actually down a few pp compared to record highs recorded before the war. The war might even exert some downward pressure. It increased the cost of living, thus reducing demand for comparative luxuries like new devices. Laptop and smartphone markets are contracting heavily right now, even for devices with stable prices enabled by long-term RAM procurement.

maxnevermind• 2 months ago

I was also wondering if it will result in Helium shortage and even higher prices the next few years, then/if it will be all over, new fabs might also come online and it will be the opposite - a glut. I believe that follows the historic pattern of boom and bust cycles of chip production.

atum47• 2 months ago

I was in the US two weeks ago, looked everywhere for 1 module 32 gb ddr4 sodimm, couldn't find it anywhere. But apparently it was pretty expensive as well (from the price tag on the empty shelf in best buy)

logotype• 2 months ago

I bought a server with 768GB RAM a couple of years ago, for cheap. Today just the RAM itself is worth more than I paid for the entire server. DDR4... Same thing with SSD, two years ago you could buy 4TB SSDs for like 250 USD, and today its more than $700. Madness!

maerF0x02• 2 months ago

As an ancient person, and considering my sense of inflation of other things I actually buy, This doesnt sound that high to me. At some point in my life CPU Ghz stopped rising and cores was the only thing to grow, and that seemed to be more slowly than clock rate did. So I guess I fully expected that asymptote to apply to RAM too. If you plot price per GB of ram across last 25 years the memory prices growth is barely a bump in the chart. In (nearly) no other physical product do we expect prices to plummet over time whilst simultaneously getting way better. Maybe we're just spoiled by the first 50 - 75 years of wild innovation that most new things go through before they asymptote ?

nerdsniper• 2 months ago

I am also that many years old, and I don’t think your analogy holds for this particular situation.

The exact same sticks/model #’s of RAM cost $200 last year, now costs $950. I don’t remember existing CPU’s ever going up in price by 5x (300-400% increases).

maerF0x02• 2 months ago

My point was never about cpu price, but that the pressures that made prices fall eventually faltered/stopped. Down 97.5% and then up 400% is still down 90%...

icedchai2• 2 months ago

Yeah, I'm pretty ancient myself. If we look back ~30 years, we're still getting a good value at even these inflated prices for electronics. Food, housing, transportation has skyrocketed, but TVs and computers are comparatively cheap, even with RAM and storage being up 100+%.

pmdr• 2 months ago

We're all grownups, why should we care about RAM prices? /s

This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.

Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.

DarkmSparks• 2 months ago

this is almost certainly a us tarriff/China sanctions thing rather than an AI thing. sticks here outside of the us tarriff system never really changed, I just bought like a month or two ago 128GB DDR5 for $500 at a time when US best buy was listing the same kingston 32GB sticks for $200 each.

That said, getting hold of them was hard and needed a special order.

mindcrime• 2 months ago

It's amazing that after all these years, a famous criticism of Neuromancer seems to have been mooted. That is, the bit about Case having that stash of stolen RAM that was his "big score" for the moment, and how Linda Lee stole it from him, yadda, yadda. For years people have read that and said something like "WTF? RAM isn't valuable enough to be a black market commodity".

Well... I guess William Gibson laughs last, after all!

theandrewbailey5• 2 months ago

I work in the refurb department of an e-waste recycling company. I've been collecting some DDR5-based systems for months, but with the prices, they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty). I've priced them at about what the CPU + RAM + SSD would sell for separately, and I'm not willing to go much lower than that.

And if you're wondering, who's throwing out DDR5 systems? A local healthcare company. The boxes for some units are crushed and have water stains on them, and I imagine others don't meet their exacting requirements in some minor way (though they look and work OK to me, regardless of scratches and dings on the case).

castlecrasher2• 2 months ago

they're probably more than what most people are looking to spend on a technically second-hand computer (even if they are like new and still under warranty)

Some people need to buy at these inflated prices anyway, and are ultimately willing to spend. Maybe it differs in your area but there's no risk in listing these on Facebook Marketplace or similar platforms and see the interest.

theandrewbailey5• 2 months ago

I've had them listed on FB Marketplace for months. In that time, I've sold four (3 to one guy, one to myself), and still have 20-ish more.

i5-13500E, 32GB DDR5, 512 GB NVMe, scratched and dinged a bit for $500 is practically a steal! Hardly anyone's biting or clicking, I don't get it...

New open box models (not scratched and dinged), if anyone's interested: https://www.ebay.com/itm/188355326179

Edit: they're intended to be retail POS PCs, like cash registers. (The motherboard literally has a header for a cash drawer!) So unless you're a particular kind of retailer, you're not asking your distributor for them. If distributors aren't looking for them, our B2B buyers aren't buying them. If they were Elite/Prodesks, Optiplexes, or Thinkcenters, they'd probably be gone by now.

nickjj• 2 months ago

I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.

Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.

All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.

I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.

mathgeek2• 2 months ago

I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.

Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.

gib444• 2 months ago

A Steam Deck is as vital as food or fuel...?

ItsYan• 2 months ago

People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.

ragequittah3• 2 months ago

I believe Steam Deck is a major exception. Given how fast they sold out I also wonder how many Valve produced this batch. Most vendors of PC parts are seeing steep declines. Also after seeing 2-3 price increases in everything (Switch, Playstation, XBOX, etc.) people are likely getting it now because the prices aren't going down anytime soon and will probably just go up again for a couple of years.

I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.

deltoidmaximus3• 2 months ago

I doubt it helps but this is such a small piece of the pie I'm not sure how much this hurts things either. Steam Deck is kind of a niche in a niche and doesn't sell in huge numbers compared to other players like PC OEMs and phone OEMs that are now all over a barrel as well as OpenAI tries to buy all the RAM so no one else can have it.

Danox2• 2 months ago

Take memory in house Apple (the talent is already there) its time again to kick another hardware supplier out and move on ala Intel, Nvidia, AMD, IBM, and Qualcomm outgoing in 2027-2028 if you want to continue to built devices and actually sell something to the public.

sleepyguy• 2 months ago

They would need their own FAB. Apple just designs, it doesn't really make anything, they sell devices where all the parts are manufactured by others.

Danox2• 2 months ago

Perfect opportunity for another joint partnership between TSMC and Apple in America, also a perfect opportunity for Intel unless they want to continue to make excuses.

gck12• 2 months ago

I'm curious, how is Apple seemingly unaffected by this RAM supply crunch? Why are they not increasing prices 2x/3x?

himata4113• 2 months ago

All started by openai wafer capacity commitments that aren't being met anymore... The ECC ram systems I've bought are now worth more than the original purchase price of the entire system and I've been debating on just selling them since they're now worth nearly double their value which would outperform any stock trades I've ever made any given year lol.

oybng• 2 months ago

The demise of personal computing. All according to plan

dcchambers• 2 months ago

Hobbyist computing is dead for the foreseeable future. These prices are untenable.

einpoklum• 2 months ago

So I thought I would not be paying for that LLM BS just because you don't haven't been suckered into a subscription... I guess I was just lacking sufficient _intelligence_ to realize this kind of thing would happen.

victorbjorklund• 2 months ago

Regret not buying more RAM last summer. And SSD:s as well. Prices are silly.

elorant• 2 months ago

GPU prices have gone 5-10% down in the last month.

drnick15• 2 months ago

They are still too high. You can't buy any desirable GPU like a 5090 at MSRP.

liendolucas• 2 months ago

Is it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM?

Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments?

For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of any kind, nor I train LLMs at all), a system with 16Gb seems to be more than enough for a vast number of applications.

jillesvangurp• 2 months ago

Actually I was using a laptop with 16GB around 2013 already. That's 13 years ago. Memory requirements kind of stagnated after that. Obviously, LLMs are driving up memory needs now.

I have a 48GB development machine which is nice if you are running IDEs, backend stuff via docker, etc. And even just having a bunch of RAM there for file caching helps keep things fast.

linguae• 2 months ago

I doubt that most computer users have more than 16GB of RAM in their systems. There are plenty of users on 8GB systems and some still on 4GB. Even when considering bloated Web apps, 8GB of RAM is passable and 16GB is plenty.

I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.

jacobgkau• 2 months ago

Use cases besides software development exist. Even relatively simple video editing can easily run past 16GB, and so can photo editing if you're working with more than a few high-resolution images at once. On the consumer side, YouTube in any Chromium-based browser with an ad blocker runs its memory usage up to 5GB+ if the tab's open too long. Add a couple of these use cases together, and you just need more RAM.

jlarocco• 2 months ago

I guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me.

But then again I remember spending hundreds of dollars as a high school student to upgrade my family's 8Mb desktop to 40 Mb.

CamperBob22• 2 months ago

I guess I'm old and haven't paid much attention recently, but $375 for 32Gb doesn't sound that bad to me.

It's not that bad, at least by recent standards, but the problem is that there's no such thing as "price per Gb." If you need 512 Gb you will not be buying 16 Gb DIMMs to get it. More likely you'll be buying 64 Gb ECC sticks, and those are much pricier.

runjake• 2 months ago

Crucial has "good" prices for DDR5 6000mhz memory on Amazon. The downside is you have to wait for shipping -- I had to wait a couple weeks. I bought when these were $300 and equivalent memory prices were like $500 at the time.

Been solid so far for 6-ish months.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-6000MHz-Overclocking-Desktop-...

kevinkeller• 2 months ago

Micron has exited the consumer business, so this is only till stocks last: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...

jscheel• 2 months ago

I tried to buy new SD cards for my camera. The cards I used to buy at $28 are now $80-120... if you can find them. Another cheaper card I used to buy for $19 is now $46. It's just absolutely insane at this point.

shimman• 2 months ago

My strategy of just buying the best quality parts within my budget when I need a new build has never failed me yet. Is pretty insane that I bought 4x 32gig dd4 ram for $400 in 2024; literally the same part I paid $200 now goes for over $900:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJ7X9P1W

Consumers need to start playing legal warfare against the companies for openly distorting the market. The ramifications will only hurt us and there needs to be a true comeuppance.

jcalvinowens• 2 months ago

It's unbelievable and it's only getting worse.

A 2x32GB DDR5 kit I paid $150 for 11 months ago costs $910 today from the same retailer. A 2x16GB DRR4 kit that was $105 last year is now $230.

The RAM alone in my newest machine would sell for over double what I paid for the entire machine one year ago.

theSuda• 2 months ago

I have been wondering about selling one of my 32gb DDR5 sticks and use the money to buy something else. I don't think a gaming pc really needs more than 32gb ram anyway.

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

I bought a prebuilt mid-2025: 32GB DDR5-6000, 2TB SSD, 9800X3D, 5070 Ti for $1900. This happened to be good timing but you can still get these specs for a similar price occasionally eg [1] was $1899 last week. Luckily for me I bought a DDR5-6000 64GB kit for $200 for no real reason. And yeah that same kit is almost $1000 today. Plus I still have the old 32GB kit.

If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.

Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.

But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...

[2] https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...

TheAmazingRace2• 2 months ago

Luckily, for gaming purposes in 2026, 32 GB of RAM is perfectly fine for the foreseeable future. I'd only consider 64 GB and up if you're using your system heavily for virtual machines or high end workstation level tasks.

hinata083• 2 months ago

Not protecting the consumer segment, as well as industrial, corporate and government usages is not fair and a short term move in a democracy, in particular with who is in management these days

Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us.

Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers

drusepth• 2 months ago

How are people selling RAM (and GPUs) these days? I have a bunch to offload but Facebook Marketplace and eBay don't sound like they're very great for small, very expensive ($1-3k) electronics...

forsalebypwner• 2 months ago

honestly eBay and FBMarketplace are the only two places I would even consider using. The worst part of FBM is dealing with flaky buyers, and the worst part of eBay is their fees.

Havoc• 2 months ago

EBay works fine

LetsGetTechnicl• 2 months ago

Must feed the AI slop machines!!

aborsy• 2 months ago

Does anyone know when will prices for RAM and drives drop to 2025 levels?

The question is to buy or wait.

nutjob2• 2 months ago

No.

wolvoleo• 2 months ago

Crap I regret never buying DDR5. Now I'm stuck on AM4. For now no issue but it can't last too long.

stronglikedan• 2 months ago

And yet there's plenty available if you have the $375. That only makes sense if there's no shortage, but plenty of price gouging under the guise of a shortage.

dekhn• 2 months ago

I remember when 32MB of RAM cost $375. I paid it anyway, even as a poor undergraduate, so I could avoid swapping while running g++, emacs, and X11 at the same time, on my cheap linux machine

tracker1• 2 months ago

I bought 96gb (2x48gb) of relatively high speed DDR5 last year for about that price... the price inflation on ram and storage is insane.

GoofGarage• 2 months ago

Lord help you if you build an HEDT with a boatload of “tuner” memory to get a meaningful boost on actual productivity where memory latency and secondary/tertiary timings matter.

I built in February 2025, and my two 48GB DIMMs were $440. Last month I checked and they were $1800 if you could even find them still in stock.

For my workloads it was like getting 2 - 2.5 more CPU cores worth of performance, so it was worth it, since the CPU was already as beefy as it could be. It was a reasonable premium then. Today? I’m not sure the math would still math.

ticulatedspline• 2 months ago

Kicking myself for not getting the other 2 sticks when I built my computer. I didn't really need them and had them in the cart, just never pulled the trigger.

Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.

CuriouslyC• 2 months ago

I bought a PC with 128GB of memory and a 3090 TI to do research on GPT-J in late 2022. This is the first time I've bought a piece of hardware that's appreciated in value.

scrubs• 2 months ago

I just bought 128gb ecc ram ddr4 2667mhz $850 which indeed was +50% of purchase.

thoughtpeddler• 2 months ago

I understand that standing up memory fabrication plants is no small feat, but how much of this is due to memory fabricators' patent moat? To what degree is this caused by IP barriers vs. the difficulty in actually manufacturing the things? If it's the case that even older-generation / process-node RAM is also going up in value, aren't those 'easier' to produce?

NamTaf• 2 months ago

I fucking hate AI

nirui• 2 months ago

The most disappointing part is not the price alone, it's that despite the price increase, the quality of the modules are still the same or even worsened.

pjmlp• 2 months ago

Well, if this helps back to native, less Electron bloat, great.

gck12• 2 months ago

My unraid server alerted me today that one of the 28TB HDDs is at 100% capacity. I bought that drive for $290, a year ago. Today, it costs $590.

I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.

etempleton• 2 months ago

I like to look at the memory I bought a little less than a year ago which has gone from $300 at time of purchase in summer 2025 to $1250 to $1500 today. Absolute insanity.

32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

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