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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
Memory is still a commodity product, in that there isn't a huge amount of difference between vendors selling products that comply with a certain technical standard. Sometimes the prices of commodities (wheat, silver, crude oil, etc) go way up when supply and demand get out of balance.
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.
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.
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!
I thought I read that Samsung SATA SSDs were discontinued, but apparently that was a rumor and Sansung has denied it. I wonder why they exceed NVMe prices. They're the only SATA drives left with DRAM. I guess they could just be milking that fact.
Well boo-hoo. It's about time more people got to know what it's like not to be on the bleeding edge. I've always had second-hand computers and only once bought myself a new laptop, the asus EeePC after the price dropped.
Ten years from now I'll get to watch inception in 4K.
A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.
Good work. I bought an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 for €35 with shipping. A Radeon W5500 would set me back €150 at the moment. 16 GiB of RAM another €90. And that's on a relatively cheap site in my country.
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
I think I paid a total of around $5,500 for the current components of my PC. Hard to say for sure since my PC has been a Ship of Theseus for over 30 years and started as a 486. The link merely reflects its current state.
At one point, PCPartPicker was showing my PC as worth $11,000. It's now at $7,200 without including the RAM or PSU. That would put it at $9,000.
> It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby
Yup.
I think it's especially bad since the gap between budget-grade and mid-grade feels like it's gotten wide. If you wanna play the latest AAA games and not feel like you need to upgrade in 3 years, you can't settle for the budget grade unless you're still gaming at 1080p.
I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days, and that's just an absurd price.
You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.
I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.
And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.
I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with gaming at 1080p, but I shudder to recommend anyone use a 1080p display for productivity. I feel like 27" 1440p is a good minimum experience. I also think that you're doing yourself a disservice going with an 8GB gpu in 2026, even for 1080p
We also have decade of studies showing that one of the best ways to boost productivity is to give people more screen real estate. This was true in the 80s, it was true in the 90s, and it didn’t really seem to plateau until something like 5-6K displays. The only reason people didn’t use bigger displays back then was due to the cost — a friend’s dad ran a prints go in the 90s and he really benefited from a display big enough to fit a whole page legibly, but that and an 11x17 printer cost enough that he needed a small business loan to buy them. He could justify it on productivity grounds but most people just accepted the hit.
Do you have links to any of these studies? I'm curious since it does not align with my personal experience, I find myself most productive on my single 720p screen -- perhaps I am missing something?
Screens got larger and higher resolution, and UX engineers decided we should fill the extra real estate with white space because...reasons? Because they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator that finds more than 3 elements on their screen confusing?
Bring back skeuomorphic design. Make buttons look like buttons again.
Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.
4k is really nice for text. Always annoyed by 1080p screens for work. But yeah gaming - 1080p is fine. I have a 9060 XT and I play games at 4k like Mortal Kombat X, Fallout 4, Evil Within 2, Dead Space Remastered and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. All 60+ fps on Linux and an ancient cpu.
Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.
Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.
Hard disagree. Once I went 4K, I could never go back to 1080p.
Sure, in an action-packed scenes of close- to moderate-quarters combat, I don't really notice it.
But in long-distance combat? Having 4x the pixels per square inch is noticeable. In slower scenes and cut scenes it's definitely an appreciable improvement.
I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place. Gave it to a good friend that I was visiting. Missed it for a little bit but quickly got used to using laptop screen. It is to the point that even if I'm in a hotel room with a large monitor/screen I usually don't bother to connect to it.
My point. Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had. But if the incentives are there, it's really not that difficult to adapt.
> I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place.
Basically the same specs here. 4K, 27".
How often were you traveling with it? I go to a PC gaming event twice/year (PDXLAN) and bring it. I don't think it's that bad moving it to the event venue and back.
> Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had.
I'm just trying to imagine what I would tell a younger cousin who was still in highschool. I'm not sure I could recommend they get into pc gaming the way things are now, and that makes me sad.
Fancy graphics won't make a bad game good, but they'll make a great game into a cinematic masterpiece.
Examples: Cyberpunk 2077 (Once all the bugs were worked out, I recognize it was dogshit on release), Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33. Would they be great games even with 15-year old graphical fidelity? Sure. But the stunning graphics definitely elevates the experience, especially in the case of Cyberpunk 2077. When you have the hardware to run everything maxed out, it's damn nearly photographic. It made me truly feel immersed in the game world in a way no other game has achieved, and I've played lots of VR games.
The most I've ever replaced all at once is the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta. But even when I do that, I still kept the same storage, case, GPU, PSU, mouse/keyboard, etc.
But otherwise, upgrades are piecemeal. New storage when my current storage is full or I want to upgrade to a new technology. New GPU when I feel like my current one is holding me back. New mouse or keyboard when my current one starts failing. The CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta when the performance gains make it worthwhile, which at this point is about every 5 years.
I guess most would probably assume at least one epic refresh where there wasn't really anything carried across except maybe the parking spot on your desk. And since the 486 era, most probably expect your desk and/or physical site changed too.
There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors, external peripheral buses, HDD controller types, expansion card buses, cooling and PSU demands, socket/RAM formats, display types, and display connection types, ...
So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate." If for no other reason than to bring up the new computer and have the old continue in transition or as some kind of spare, backup, or hand-me-down.
> There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors
Only one change really from AT/Baby AT to ATX. We've been on ATX now for 30 years. I could grab an A-Bit BH6 motherboard from 1998 and put it in my modern Hyte Y60 case if I wanted to.
> external peripheral buses
Since we're talking starting from 486 era, that only means going from PS/2 to USB for keyboard/mouse, parallel port for your printer, maybe serial port for a modem. During the transition period, adapters were cheap and common.
I don't know about the ESDI to IDE transition, but I know from IDE/PATA to SATA there was a period where motherboards had both. During the transition from VGA to DVI, then DVI to DisplayPort, GPUs had both.
> cooling and PSU demands
If you overbuy on the PSU a little, you can get a ton of futureproofing. CPUs came with stock coolers until just a few years ago.
> socket/RAM formats
Which is why the CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade was typically done as a trifecta.
> So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate."
Never felt the need. As mentioned above, there was frequently a transition period for when hardware supported both old and new tech.
Yeah, I guess I have a longer view since our first IBM compatible PC was a 286 based XT form factor. And in households with multiple computer users, upgrades could look more like mitosis (or nuclear decay?), with some parts splitting off to form new computers and less clear lineage of one computer just mutating.
The buses I was thinking of included ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, PCIe. Yes there were ways to carry some things across since motherboards often had a couple bus types at once. But in my experience, the older peripheral cards often just got retired as they became either obsolete concepts or totally integrated in the next motherboard. I.e. you once commonly had serial port and parallel port expansion cards, game controller cards, sound cards, disk controller cards, and basic 2D graphics cards.
Cases also got smaller because the motherboards needed less space, people needed fewer expansion cards, and also because people needed fewer and fewer "drive bays". In the early days, you saw both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, big chunky HDDs, and possibly other weird removable media drives. Now you can easily have a capable corporate-style PC with no expansion cards, and no drives other than the M.2 stuck into the motherboard.
On the external side, I can think of PS/2, serial, parallel, USB, external SCSI, Firewire, e-SATA. Some of these coexisted with USB until it became high speed enough to subsume them. With graphics there was VGA, composite video, DVI, DisplayPort. Sound had 3.5mm, coax, toslink, coax digital. Communications commonly had POTS modem, coax ethernet, twisted pair ethernet. Somewhat esoteric were WiFi and bluetooth adapters. These could be on dedicated expansion cards, integrated into sound/graphics/comms cards, or integrated into the motherboard.
There were also weird expansion cards that paired with a particular external device, like a scanner or Hercules monochrome monitor. And more unusual cards like video-capture and digital TV or radio tuners.
The PSU issue wasn't just overall wattage but different set or balance of voltage rails and kinds of internal connectors needed for powered components. And shifts like standby power/soft-off behaviors.
I also recall AT to ATX and later uATX. Earlier motherboards were massive with socketed DRAM and SRAM chips and lots of simpler logic chips all over. They just kept shrinking as everything got more highly integrated. If you ever got a surplus Dell you might have encountered BTX too, which was like the left-handed universe.
I also had a phase with two uATX cases and almost had a "two space garbage collection" upgrade cycle, shifting parts in, between them, and out. One was my desktop PC and the other a "media PC" attached to TV and home stereo.
Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats. This meant more incompatible chassis, motherboard, and PSU formats. For me, a computer after 2000 was case/PSU + mobo/CPU/RAM + disk. The disk was either a single HDD/SSD or small software RAID array. At one time, we needed multiple disks for capacity, but now it can just be one or two M.2 drives on the motherboard and no disk bays at all.
This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice, and then that becomes another thing that sees little upgrade and carry forward over longer time periods...
Did you mod the case? I can't imagine a case designed for a 486 would be super great for thermals for a modern CPU and discrete GPU combo. For me, it was such a pain in the butt to try and mod it vs. $100 for a case that "just works", so that was the nail in the coffin for my old AT case.
I think modern rendering techniques need more pixels. 1440p should be considered bare minimum, and 4K the norm. Unfortunately, the prices are what they are.
On the flipside, being a low-spec gamer is better than ever. Indies, oldies, mods... all in great shape.
> I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days
Alternative wording: You recommend to spend more than $3000? There are people out there who don't toss money around as if it's an endless commodity. I spent a friction of that for gaming computers in my entire life.
As much as I hate to say it, the move at this point is GeForce Now, at least for the time being... I just subscribed to the 200 USD/year Ultimate plan with a free 007 game. My ping to the datacenter is a mere 5ms, with 5080, RTX, 4k@60Hz (which my projector can drive) I am getting way more performance and similar latency than I would if I were using my own, semi-affordable rig or even a PS5. It's mind-blowing, really, and I recommend anyone to at least give it a try.
If I take out the cost of that 007 game, that plan i 140 USD a year. If you consider the cost of the electricity, it alone would likely cover it. In the past one would typically include hardware depreciation cost in such calculations to drive the point home...but the 3-4k USD I am not spending spending on a similar rig alone can generate me some 100-150 USD in bank over a year – not to mention the inflation! So, all in all, it's basically free, comparatively speaking.
I'm actually some 200 miles from the data center, but Nvidia has been doing a stellar job in connecting to the backbones of all the major ISPs around. If I actually lived down the road from them, it would be as low as 1 to 2ms, as reported by plenty of users. This isn't uncommon, especially in the EU.
I routinely use it over a 5G mobile connection, often while moving, far from any datacenter, and it's usually fine as long as my signal is good. They do a fantastic job out of squeezing what they can from your connection.
It makes economic sense. A lot of my gaming happens on GeForce Now.
At home, I am still rocking a plain old GTX 1080 with an i7 6700k, it's still kicking ass a decade later and plays most of what I throw at it, and I have an M-Series MBP for work, though it's capable of running plenty modern titles on Ultra.
My Steam Deck absorbs the majority of my local gaming, however, even though I have to run games at lower spec. It's just an extremely convenient device and I dock it to my projector, which I run at 1080p@240Hz anyway because I prefer it over 4K@60Hz.
For things the deck can't handle though, GeForce Now rocks. If the Steam Machine doesn't become too expensive, I might snag one and a Steam Frame headset as well, and that will probably have me set through any impending breakdown in the supply chain for at least a decade. I'll probably be rocking this GTX 1080 until 2040, the way things are going.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Zuckerberg is pretty out of touch with how people actually live and that makes him pretty blind to the actual implications of these technologies. It's too easy to become enamored of technologies and way too hard to find actual applications for them where the technology makes things better rather than just different.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Yup. Once production ramps up (and then subsequently overshoots) in the next couple years we're going to have GPUs with 96GB VRAM for the price of a 4090 today.
> Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut
The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI.
> Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possibly permanently: manufacturers of motherboard, cases, fans, and the entire consumer PC supply chain are being negatively impacted. Expect bankruptcies and consolidation if this lasts for 2 more years.
CXMT is a tiny supplier, it will take years before they significantly expand the market. They're pretty much in the same boat as Samsung and SK Hynix, they just have less of an incentive to actively curtail supply.
For some definitions of tiny. Their current monthly wafer production is about 1/2 that of Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron. They're rapidly expanding, but so are the others, so they're unlikely to catch up anytime soon, but that alone doesn't make them tiny. Maybe tiny in the HBM space or even DDR5, given their trailing process nodes.
The big 3 are the only ones capable of bringing forth a glut, IMO. Of the Chinese challengers, CXMT is the frontrunner, there's also JHICC and others, but I don't think any of them will have sizable volumes in the next 2 years, despite extremely favorable market conditions. This is not a dig against them; they (and their domestic vendors) will need time and experience to get the yields up, and will undoubtedly eventually dominate the consumer market in about 5 years, according to my outsider crystal ball.
> This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US.
No such thing as a free lunch. Whilst a lot of industries are doing extremely well right now (i.e. everything involved in datacenter construction), everyone else has to actually pay for it.
Therein also lies the damage; The economy wasn't doing so great to begin with, and now this massive multi-trillion-dollar expense has been added.
The direct expenses come out of the pockets of Big Tech, but all the indirect stuff like the DRAM crisis affect the wider economy directly.
It's not odd at all to call this economic damage unless you're that disconnected from anything but AI/high-tech SV companies.
There's smaller businesses that I know _need_ data capacity (hard drives) that can't afford them and are facing serious CAPEX challenges.
I work for a start up that helps folks move off of existing on-prem virtualization solutions and every small to medium company across every sector you can think of aren't just able to not afford additional storage and memory, they can't find them either.
There isn't as much stock as you think. I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop. It's been absolutely terrible for 90% of the industry.
> I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment.
Sentiment is the right word here. None of us really know, and go by feeling. If you perceive the AI boom as approaching tulip craze levels of irrationality, it feels pretty dire.
The RAM is a commodity and may be repurposed afterward. This kind of thing is a bit like a debt jubilee when the dust clears and survivors scavenge the dead. But a lot of other build-out may essentially be waste. To me, apologists for this boom seem to be harboring a variant of the broken windows fallacy. Not all economic activity is productive.
The other kind of damage is opportunity cost. How many players in other industries are being strategically harmed by this situation? We can't all just live on AI token output if these other industries retract too far.
I wonder what kind of bone yard is going to come out of all the mania spending. I am picturing a sea of GPU's being liquidated from startups no one's ever heard of.
The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.
Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.
> 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.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy.
There are two issues... one being that an economy needs people to buy things to work, and people only can buy things if they have money, and people only have money when they have work - but everyone is laying off people left and right due to "AI".
The other issue is that there's trillions of dollars floating around between all the companies. It is likely that a significant chunk of these will fail and give us another 2007.
We'll be out of work whilst bailing out these companies with printed money and another round of inflation. The middle class will cease to exist. But hey the stock market will show higher numbers so its all good.
The damage is not merely in the increased demand for electricity. Actually, assuming governments get their heads out of the sand about energy poverty, cheap solar, wind, and batteries will fix that. The real problem is all the other crowding-out of investment that having one big megahit technology can do.
Let's say you're an alchemist living in ancient China. You discover some kind of strange material made out of melted sand and want to sell some of it as a drinking vessel. One problem: everyone already uses porcelain for that purpose, which holds hot drinks without cracking like your strange sand ones do. So you toss that in the trash and move onto the next attempt at making an elixir of life.
Problem is, what you invented was a kind of glass; which has no economic niche in the society you live in. Some funny other places in the far west might invent it, though - hell, they might even figure out that you can grind this material down into lenses and discover an entire field of magic - optics - that you discarded because nobody needed tea cups that crack when you put tea in them.
Now, let's say you live in a society that has access to some kind of artificial intelligence. You are going to chuck the AI at absolutely everything, because on average, it tends to be better at all the problems you throw at it. Even simple things like spell-checkers get turned into AI invocations because, well, the Bitter Lesson dictates that having enough compute and learning to throw at the problem will always yield a better result than hard-coded nonsense logic that demos well. And even if you want to, well, you couldn't afford the RAM to run modern vibe-coded slop software anyway. Porcelain crowds out investment in glass, and as a result, we are limited to only having technologies that can be made by or from a pile of stolen books tied together with a bunch of matrix multiplies.
> Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers
It's not just about the price of transformers (which have gone up!), lead times have gone up too - any infrastructure project involving transformers will be delayed by varying amounts - including grid-connected solar, at a time when energy prices are going insane.
> 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".
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!
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.
While DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.
Personally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.
Unbelievably, even DDR3 isn't spared. Our suppliers have been quoting us much higher prices for DDR3 for months now, and we're experiencing persistent stock shortages. Fabs are abandoning legacy nodes to prioritize AI capacity, making it rough even for maintaining old gear.
It isn't really unbelievable. Anyone who could sub in DDR4 for their projects would do so which increased the price. And then anyone who was still using DDR4 for projects would respond to the increased price by moving to cheaper DDR3 if they could. It wouldn't take much of an unexpected demand increase to move the needle since I don't believe much DDR3 or DDR4 is even being manufactured anymore. And then you have the supply side: Increased prices of upgrades will cause many of them to be delayed or cancelled denying the refurb/used market supply of the old hardware.
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)
$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...
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure there are things local models are good enough at in non-coding work, but for anything complex I do not find this to be the case.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
I don't know what kind of coding, but for my case it's been useless. Not working code almost every time. It's much quicker to just write it by hand than use that model.
I've been experimenting with Qwen3 Coder Next and Copilot for a little Rust toy project and it's been trucking along. It does require a fair bit of hand-holding (or perhaps I just don't trust it to give it larger tasks), but it works alright.
I suspect that a lot of people are ignoring the shift to a model where you feed entire specifications to a group of models in differing configurations controlling different aspects of the development task. In that model it doesn't really matter how fast the tokens are generated, only that they are eventually generated and that the assembly is good enough. It's a specification compiler at that point.
And taking everyone's 401ks down with them because of the idiotic rules changes to accommodate SpaceX? Its going to be the largest transfer (theft) of wealth since 2008. AI is the only thing driving any kind of growth in the market at all now. That pops, its going to bring the entire economy down with it.
The vast majority of index funds are float adjusted. SpaceX will not have that many shares available relative to the total value of the company. It's a negligible percent of the overall market cap of say, VTI. This commonly repeated trope is misinformation. The change in rules is more of a problem than the actual value.
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.
Exactly, AI firms can and will pay premium to hoard, and without that pressure hobbyists and regular users will let demand slide down to "normal" levels.
Except, Chinese firms have entered the market now to capture the public market while the "top tier" firms supply AI firms. If the AI firms stops buying everything the toptier firms will come back into a market that has begun to be overrun by cheaper Chinese alternatives. It could get damn bloody (but good for consumers).
Lots of cheap chinese RAM is exactly what we need right now. RAM used to be cheap, it was a common excuse for not optimizing software 10 years ago ("this thing is cheap, don't worry about Electron!")
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.
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.
My point is that dram demand is mostly orthogonal to whether everyone is using open weight models or secret weight models. Heavy demand for local models (whether secret or open weight) will require even more aggregate DRAM than for shared.
Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.
Open weight models allow for repurposing existing hardware locally, and there's a lot of it around - far more than the amount of new RAM being supplied. So they add some short-term downward pressure to the price. (But not very much, since these datacenter builds are long-term investments that are targeted at eventually running far larger models.)
If regular people can repurpose old hardware, so can shared providers, who can extract more value from the hardware and thus afford to pay more.
In a constrained market, supply and demand favors folks who can most efficiently extract rent. Local models only make sense in a world with abundant compute and energy.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
I feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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).
>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.
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.
Why don’t you part them out? The market for the parts will be more liquid. You might sell faster and at a higher price. You could try doing it once and see how it goes.
The only thing I've found that's annoying with these POS/Office builds across various brands and models from 2013-2017 is the PSUs are less reliable and end up failing if you're doing more than just running excel and outlook. The OEM PSUs are often priced at ~25-70% of the value of the entire machine. I've seen some people end up cutting a hole in the case and bolt an ATX PSU to the exterior.
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.
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.
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.
It also was the same chip back then and the price difference significant. But maybe you are correct and with the current conditions it doesn't make a difference. I dont know.
You're right. Even my 2080ti is really great for gaming, Photoshop etc, and that's roughly the same as the 3060. Even does pretty good on smaller LLMs.
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
Agreed. I'm actually using nothing newer than 2018 and you get a ton of bang-for-your-buck with this old stuff still. I have a 2080ti and it plays a lot of fairly recent games pretty nicely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Windows it would nag me to update but apparently the CPU is too old for new Windows
When I was trying to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 I got the same warning. It is the reason why I'm now happily running Xubuntu on the same machine.
I did end up installing a Windows 11 VM (VirtualBox) which works perfectly fine running as a guest under Xubuntu on a 4790k (screw you Microsoft). But I otherwise never want go back to Windows as a daily driver. The enshittification just got too much for me.
<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.
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.
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.
I suppose if you turn off ray tracing and don't mind 1900x1200. I'm trying to push 1440p w/ ray tracing. Sometimes 4k if it's a good TV game. I'm constantly having to turn settings down to get >60 fps. These days more and more games seem like they expect some sort of ray tracing to get the full experience.
It's also quite nice to actually hit 165 fps in some less demanding games on my 165 hz monitor.
I guess you and the other poster just have different standards.
I've personally never found Ray Tracing to be worth the performance impact. I have a 3090 and a 7900 XT at home, on different computers. When opening a new game, I just keep everything on Medium, turn RT off if possible, and enjoy good fps at 4K in most games.
Doom The Dark Ages was the only one that didn't perform as well as I'd like. Still, perfectly playable at 1080p, Medium settings, targeting 120+ fps.
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.
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.
Not just "rather overrated", it's completely overrated. There just isn't a big difference in visual quality with 4k. It is primarily driven by companies trying to sell gear, not by it actually looking better.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has warned Samsung and SK Hynix they could face 100% tariffs, framing it as a choice between paying a 100% tariff or building memory fabs in America...
Do tariff threats still matter? After being struck down, I thought the only new tariffs which could happen would have to be enacted by Congress? Or world that be a fun game where the new illegal tariffs would be on the books until the courts invalidate them again?
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).
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.
And? The primary goal should be to catch and stop pollution, not make manufacturers spend years promising not to do something they're not allowed to do. If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
> If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
First of all I disagree that it's difficult to get injunctions to stop an activity that was illegal from the start. In fact, sometimes environmental reviews can backfire because they typically require affirmation by the government, which can create a defense to doing something that would otherwise be judged illegal. That type of loophole is why people are so cynical.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
Sure, but in terms of expenditure and especially time (and time is a huge expense because of the cost of raising and securing financing) that work doesn't make up the bulk of the cost. There's nothing wrong with impact statements themselves. You need independent assessments of hazards beyond the well known ones like chemical storage, where in most cases existing codes and regulations are more than adequate. It's that in many places, California especially, there's no fixed goal post. The review process has effectively become a vehicle for local and even national politics to play out. And a method for detractors to spread FUD (again especially in California where anyone, not just officials or local residents, can challenge and drag out review of an impact statement itself, let alone proposed mitigations). Just look at what has happened with CaHSR (they're still not completely done getting write-off on all the necessary impact statements for the planned route) or the politics involved with approving offshore wind farms, where Trump and, to a lesser extent, the Biden administration showed how much pure politics plays into things and drives costs up. (And federal EIP review process is, at least historically, much simpler and less subject to political games compared to some state analogs.)
The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).
It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.
Environmental review is just part of the permitting by state and local authorities. you could completely get rid of it and still not get your permits.
I agree with many of your points but you are railing against the wrong culprit.
The process is there because Industry has proven that it can't be trusted.
The only way to stop it is to verify that it won't happen in the first place by making sure their building plans are up to par. The song-and-dance, well even with the review, they try their damn hardest to cut corners and hood-wig wherever they can.
The main blocker was that there were bats there so they needed to buy separate land to preserve. 20k pages of environmental review is just make work to spend money and create an unnecessary paper trail. If polluting with x is illegal then its illegal. The review doesnt stop that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost?
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
I unfortunately have met a few. I have one friend that legit scares me... we saw how people reacted to o4 being discontinued.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
It's like how some people like listening to Ed Sheeran. So yes, there is demand. But nobody is "getting real work done" with these toy AI models.
Real AI is a geo-political threat, and will not be allowed to exist for the average person. So, enjoy your toy AI models, because that's all you're getting.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
$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."
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.
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 ?
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).
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%...
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+%.
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.
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. :-)
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.
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.
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.
You could get a 990pro 2 terabyte Samsung SSD for €150 just last year. Memory had become a commodity product.
Memory is still a commodity product, in that there isn't a huge amount of difference between vendors selling products that comply with a certain technical standard. Sometimes the prices of commodities (wheat, silver, crude oil, etc) go way up when supply and demand get out of balance.
I did buy one of those for 155eur on 9 November 2025.
Very lucky me!
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.
I put together a new PC last year and got some extra memory, because why not. Crazy how much that would cost me today.
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.
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!
Those are rookie numbers
https://stocks.sjer.red/
I thought I read that Samsung SATA SSDs were discontinued, but apparently that was a rumor and Sansung has denied it. I wonder why they exceed NVMe prices. They're the only SATA drives left with DRAM. I guess they could just be milking that fact.
Well boo-hoo. It's about time more people got to know what it's like not to be on the bleeding edge. I've always had second-hand computers and only once bought myself a new laptop, the asus EeePC after the price dropped.
Ten years from now I'll get to watch inception in 4K.
A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.
Good work. I bought an AMD Ryzen 3 3100 for €35 with shipping. A Radeon W5500 would set me back €150 at the moment. 16 GiB of RAM another €90. And that's on a relatively cheap site in my country.
You’ll want 64K bro Inception is a very loud movie
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
Nvidia already has a PC gaming streaming service that integrates with your steam library and a couple other launchers' libraries.
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Sohcahtoa82/saved/n76zkL
I think I paid a total of around $5,500 for the current components of my PC. Hard to say for sure since my PC has been a Ship of Theseus for over 30 years and started as a 486. The link merely reflects its current state.
At one point, PCPartPicker was showing my PC as worth $11,000. It's now at $7,200 without including the RAM or PSU. That would put it at $9,000.
> It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby
Yup.
I think it's especially bad since the gap between budget-grade and mid-grade feels like it's gotten wide. If you wanna play the latest AAA games and not feel like you need to upgrade in 3 years, you can't settle for the budget grade unless you're still gaming at 1080p.
I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days, and that's just an absurd price.
There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.
You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.
I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.
And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.
I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.
[1] https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...
[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=594,593&sort...
[3] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=596&sort=pri...
There's not necessarily anything wrong with gaming at 1080p, but I shudder to recommend anyone use a 1080p display for productivity. I feel like 27" 1440p is a good minimum experience. I also think that you're doing yourself a disservice going with an 8GB gpu in 2026, even for 1080p
How do you reconcile your comment with the fact that computers were used productively for decades before the invention of 1080p and larger formats.
Approximately the same way we reconcile with centuries of scribes being productive with quills and velum?
We also have decade of studies showing that one of the best ways to boost productivity is to give people more screen real estate. This was true in the 80s, it was true in the 90s, and it didn’t really seem to plateau until something like 5-6K displays. The only reason people didn’t use bigger displays back then was due to the cost — a friend’s dad ran a prints go in the 90s and he really benefited from a display big enough to fit a whole page legibly, but that and an 11x17 printer cost enough that he needed a small business loan to buy them. He could justify it on productivity grounds but most people just accepted the hit.
Do you have links to any of these studies? I'm curious since it does not align with my personal experience, I find myself most productive on my single 720p screen -- perhaps I am missing something?
Because decades ago, applications didn’t waste anywhere near the absurd amounts of screen real estate that they do now.
Look at how much you can fit onto a 1920x1080 display running Windows 2000 compared with a recent release of GNOME.
Screens got larger and higher resolution, and UX engineers decided we should fill the extra real estate with white space because...reasons? Because they're trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator that finds more than 3 elements on their screen confusing?
Bring back skeuomorphic design. Make buttons look like buttons again.
>There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though
Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.
4k is really nice for text. Always annoyed by 1080p screens for work. But yeah gaming - 1080p is fine. I have a 9060 XT and I play games at 4k like Mortal Kombat X, Fallout 4, Evil Within 2, Dead Space Remastered and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. All 60+ fps on Linux and an ancient cpu.
Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.
Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.
> There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.
Hard disagree. Once I went 4K, I could never go back to 1080p.
Sure, in an action-packed scenes of close- to moderate-quarters combat, I don't really notice it.
But in long-distance combat? Having 4x the pixels per square inch is noticeable. In slower scenes and cut scenes it's definitely an appreciable improvement.
I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place. Gave it to a good friend that I was visiting. Missed it for a little bit but quickly got used to using laptop screen. It is to the point that even if I'm in a hotel room with a large monitor/screen I usually don't bother to connect to it.
My point. Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had. But if the incentives are there, it's really not that difficult to adapt.
> I had a 4K 26 inch monitor and yes it was nice. But I travel too much and didn't enjoy moving it from place to place.
Basically the same specs here. 4K, 27".
How often were you traveling with it? I go to a PC gaming event twice/year (PDXLAN) and bring it. I don't think it's that bad moving it to the event venue and back.
> Once you get better things yes it's easy to think you could never use the lesser tools you once had.
You're probably right.
You really need 4K to appreciate all the hallucinated details in games.
I'm just trying to imagine what I would tell a younger cousin who was still in highschool. I'm not sure I could recommend they get into pc gaming the way things are now, and that makes me sad.
I would say there's a ton of great games made >= 5 years ago, almost all still available, and cheap :)
The games from 15-25 years ago are also great, especially the ones still available those are the good games.
CS 1.5, OpenTTD, AoE2, the likes..
Fancier graphics doesn't make games better. Gameplay, stories and jokes do.
Fancy graphics won't make a bad game good, but they'll make a great game into a cinematic masterpiece.
Examples: Cyberpunk 2077 (Once all the bugs were worked out, I recognize it was dogshit on release), Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33. Would they be great games even with 15-year old graphical fidelity? Sure. But the stunning graphics definitely elevates the experience, especially in the case of Cyberpunk 2077. When you have the hardware to run everything maxed out, it's damn nearly photographic. It made me truly feel immersed in the game world in a way no other game has achieved, and I've played lots of VR games.
you've 'upgraded' the same pc since a 486? i really can't believe that unless you're counting your mouse and keyboard.
> you've 'upgraded' the same pc since a 486?
Yes.
The most I've ever replaced all at once is the CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta. But even when I do that, I still kept the same storage, case, GPU, PSU, mouse/keyboard, etc.
But otherwise, upgrades are piecemeal. New storage when my current storage is full or I want to upgrade to a new technology. New GPU when I feel like my current one is holding me back. New mouse or keyboard when my current one starts failing. The CPU/mobo/RAM trifecta when the performance gains make it worthwhile, which at this point is about every 5 years.
I'm not sure why this is hard to believe.
I get it, the Beige Box of Theseus.
I guess most would probably assume at least one epic refresh where there wasn't really anything carried across except maybe the parking spot on your desk. And since the 486 era, most probably expect your desk and/or physical site changed too.
There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors, external peripheral buses, HDD controller types, expansion card buses, cooling and PSU demands, socket/RAM formats, display types, and display connection types, ...
So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate." If for no other reason than to bring up the new computer and have the old continue in transition or as some kind of spare, backup, or hand-me-down.
> There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors
Only one change really from AT/Baby AT to ATX. We've been on ATX now for 30 years. I could grab an A-Bit BH6 motherboard from 1998 and put it in my modern Hyte Y60 case if I wanted to.
> external peripheral buses
Since we're talking starting from 486 era, that only means going from PS/2 to USB for keyboard/mouse, parallel port for your printer, maybe serial port for a modem. During the transition period, adapters were cheap and common.
> HDD controller types, [..], display connection types.
I don't know about the ESDI to IDE transition, but I know from IDE/PATA to SATA there was a period where motherboards had both. During the transition from VGA to DVI, then DVI to DisplayPort, GPUs had both.
> cooling and PSU demands
If you overbuy on the PSU a little, you can get a ton of futureproofing. CPUs came with stock coolers until just a few years ago.
> socket/RAM formats
Which is why the CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade was typically done as a trifecta.
> So many opportunities to think, "this seems like a time for a clean slate."
Never felt the need. As mentioned above, there was frequently a transition period for when hardware supported both old and new tech.
>ESDI to IDE transition
ESDI and ST-506 MFM/RLL before it lived in universe of dedicated HDD interface cards.
And for the more prosumer level, there were (non-RAID) SCSI controllers with big fat cables before there was eventually SATA.
Can see moving parts into a new case as being just a transition, and then replacements from there continuing the treadmill.
But it would have been much cooler if you were still on the 486 era case :D
Yeah, I guess I have a longer view since our first IBM compatible PC was a 286 based XT form factor. And in households with multiple computer users, upgrades could look more like mitosis (or nuclear decay?), with some parts splitting off to form new computers and less clear lineage of one computer just mutating.
The buses I was thinking of included ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, PCIe. Yes there were ways to carry some things across since motherboards often had a couple bus types at once. But in my experience, the older peripheral cards often just got retired as they became either obsolete concepts or totally integrated in the next motherboard. I.e. you once commonly had serial port and parallel port expansion cards, game controller cards, sound cards, disk controller cards, and basic 2D graphics cards.
Cases also got smaller because the motherboards needed less space, people needed fewer expansion cards, and also because people needed fewer and fewer "drive bays". In the early days, you saw both 5.25" and 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, big chunky HDDs, and possibly other weird removable media drives. Now you can easily have a capable corporate-style PC with no expansion cards, and no drives other than the M.2 stuck into the motherboard.
On the external side, I can think of PS/2, serial, parallel, USB, external SCSI, Firewire, e-SATA. Some of these coexisted with USB until it became high speed enough to subsume them. With graphics there was VGA, composite video, DVI, DisplayPort. Sound had 3.5mm, coax, toslink, coax digital. Communications commonly had POTS modem, coax ethernet, twisted pair ethernet. Somewhat esoteric were WiFi and bluetooth adapters. These could be on dedicated expansion cards, integrated into sound/graphics/comms cards, or integrated into the motherboard.
There were also weird expansion cards that paired with a particular external device, like a scanner or Hercules monochrome monitor. And more unusual cards like video-capture and digital TV or radio tuners.
The PSU issue wasn't just overall wattage but different set or balance of voltage rails and kinds of internal connectors needed for powered components. And shifts like standby power/soft-off behaviors.
I also recall AT to ATX and later uATX. Earlier motherboards were massive with socketed DRAM and SRAM chips and lots of simpler logic chips all over. They just kept shrinking as everything got more highly integrated. If you ever got a surplus Dell you might have encountered BTX too, which was like the left-handed universe.
I also had a phase with two uATX cases and almost had a "two space garbage collection" upgrade cycle, shifting parts in, between them, and out. One was my desktop PC and the other a "media PC" attached to TV and home stereo.
Some folks like me had a phase of trying to accelerate the down-sizing, abandoning our ATX/uATX for things like the Shuttle XPC mini/bookshelf computer formats. This meant more incompatible chassis, motherboard, and PSU formats. For me, a computer after 2000 was case/PSU + mobo/CPU/RAM + disk. The disk was either a single HDD/SSD or small software RAID array. At one time, we needed multiple disks for capacity, but now it can just be one or two M.2 drives on the motherboard and no disk bays at all.
This also leads to periodically thinking just a laptop will suffice, and then that becomes another thing that sees little upgrade and carry forward over longer time periods...
Did you mod the case? I can't imagine a case designed for a 486 would be super great for thermals for a modern CPU and discrete GPU combo. For me, it was such a pain in the butt to try and mod it vs. $100 for a case that "just works", so that was the nail in the coffin for my old AT case.
I've upgraded cases along the way, too.
Usually for aesthetics though. Better airflow was secondary until more recently.
> unless you're still gaming at 1080p
I think modern rendering techniques need more pixels. 1440p should be considered bare minimum, and 4K the norm. Unfortunately, the prices are what they are.
On the flipside, being a low-spec gamer is better than ever. Indies, oldies, mods... all in great shape.
> I wouldn't recommend spending under $3,000 for a gaming PC these days
Alternative wording: You recommend to spend more than $3000? There are people out there who don't toss money around as if it's an endless commodity. I spent a friction of that for gaming computers in my entire life.
> pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby,
As much as I hate to say it, the move at this point is GeForce Now, at least for the time being... I just subscribed to the 200 USD/year Ultimate plan with a free 007 game. My ping to the datacenter is a mere 5ms, with 5080, RTX, 4k@60Hz (which my projector can drive) I am getting way more performance and similar latency than I would if I were using my own, semi-affordable rig or even a PS5. It's mind-blowing, really, and I recommend anyone to at least give it a try.
If I take out the cost of that 007 game, that plan i 140 USD a year. If you consider the cost of the electricity, it alone would likely cover it. In the past one would typically include hardware depreciation cost in such calculations to drive the point home...but the 3-4k USD I am not spending spending on a similar rig alone can generate me some 100-150 USD in bank over a year – not to mention the inflation! So, all in all, it's basically free, comparatively speaking.
Great if you have fiber and live down the road from the datacenter.
I'm actually some 200 miles from the data center, but Nvidia has been doing a stellar job in connecting to the backbones of all the major ISPs around. If I actually lived down the road from them, it would be as low as 1 to 2ms, as reported by plenty of users. This isn't uncommon, especially in the EU.
But yeah, you need a fiber.
I routinely use it over a 5G mobile connection, often while moving, far from any datacenter, and it's usually fine as long as my signal is good. They do a fantastic job out of squeezing what they can from your connection.
It makes economic sense. A lot of my gaming happens on GeForce Now.
At home, I am still rocking a plain old GTX 1080 with an i7 6700k, it's still kicking ass a decade later and plays most of what I throw at it, and I have an M-Series MBP for work, though it's capable of running plenty modern titles on Ultra.
My Steam Deck absorbs the majority of my local gaming, however, even though I have to run games at lower spec. It's just an extremely convenient device and I dock it to my projector, which I run at 1080p@240Hz anyway because I prefer it over 4K@60Hz.
For things the deck can't handle though, GeForce Now rocks. If the Steam Machine doesn't become too expensive, I might snag one and a Steam Frame headset as well, and that will probably have me set through any impending breakdown in the supply chain for at least a decade. I'll probably be rocking this GTX 1080 until 2040, the way things are going.
It is the move if you want to be Jensen's little bitch, and want to fuck gaming and computer ownership for everyone, forever.
I bought my 4090 at MSRP three years ago and now used 4090s are selling for 50%+ above what I paid.
At least it seems to not get worse.
It shows 3.5" spinning rust are climbing this year too.
We are cooked tbh.
Makes the Framework Desktop look like a bargain.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
That would require having actual technological flair beyond 'buying potential competitors'
Indeed... I am starting to be convinced he's only good in terms of running social media apparatuses.
I think Zuckerberg is pretty out of touch with how people actually live and that makes him pretty blind to the actual implications of these technologies. It's too easy to become enamored of technologies and way too hard to find actual applications for them where the technology makes things better rather than just different.
Mine the miners.
> €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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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!
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
I doubt it. Desktops don't add substantial hardware features often or get damaged in the same way phones do.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors
The evidence coming out is saying otherwise.
Yup. Once production ramps up (and then subsequently overshoots) in the next couple years we're going to have GPUs with 96GB VRAM for the price of a 4090 today.
They're not ramping up capacity though.
https://www.techzine.eu/news/devices/141775/sk-hynix-to-doub...
CXMT will.
> Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut
The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI.
> Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd.
It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possibly permanently: manufacturers of motherboard, cases, fans, and the entire consumer PC supply chain are being negatively impacted. Expect bankruptcies and consolidation if this lasts for 2 more years.
Good that there is a _fourth_ one. That's actively ramping up and looking to increase market share. CXMT.
CXMT is a tiny supplier, it will take years before they significantly expand the market. They're pretty much in the same boat as Samsung and SK Hynix, they just have less of an incentive to actively curtail supply.
For some definitions of tiny. Their current monthly wafer production is about 1/2 that of Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron. They're rapidly expanding, but so are the others, so they're unlikely to catch up anytime soon, but that alone doesn't make them tiny. Maybe tiny in the HBM space or even DDR5, given their trailing process nodes.
The big 3 are the only ones capable of bringing forth a glut, IMO. Of the Chinese challengers, CXMT is the frontrunner, there's also JHICC and others, but I don't think any of them will have sizable volumes in the next 2 years, despite extremely favorable market conditions. This is not a dig against them; they (and their domestic vendors) will need time and experience to get the yields up, and will undoubtedly eventually dominate the consumer market in about 5 years, according to my outsider crystal ball.
> This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US.
No such thing as a free lunch. Whilst a lot of industries are doing extremely well right now (i.e. everything involved in datacenter construction), everyone else has to actually pay for it.
Therein also lies the damage; The economy wasn't doing so great to begin with, and now this massive multi-trillion-dollar expense has been added.
The direct expenses come out of the pockets of Big Tech, but all the indirect stuff like the DRAM crisis affect the wider economy directly.
It's not odd at all to call this economic damage unless you're that disconnected from anything but AI/high-tech SV companies.
There's smaller businesses that I know _need_ data capacity (hard drives) that can't afford them and are facing serious CAPEX challenges.
I work for a start up that helps folks move off of existing on-prem virtualization solutions and every small to medium company across every sector you can think of aren't just able to not afford additional storage and memory, they can't find them either.
There isn't as much stock as you think. I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop. It's been absolutely terrible for 90% of the industry.
> I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment.
Sentiment is the right word here. None of us really know, and go by feeling. If you perceive the AI boom as approaching tulip craze levels of irrationality, it feels pretty dire.
The RAM is a commodity and may be repurposed afterward. This kind of thing is a bit like a debt jubilee when the dust clears and survivors scavenge the dead. But a lot of other build-out may essentially be waste. To me, apologists for this boom seem to be harboring a variant of the broken windows fallacy. Not all economic activity is productive.
The other kind of damage is opportunity cost. How many players in other industries are being strategically harmed by this situation? We can't all just live on AI token output if these other industries retract too far.
I wonder what kind of bone yard is going to come out of all the mania spending. I am picturing a sea of GPU's being liquidated from startups no one's ever heard of.
The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.
Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.
RAM is now 4 times as expensive for the people who need it. Yes, economic damage. Its not like RAM was always sold out prior to this.
> 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.
> I know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy.
There are two issues... one being that an economy needs people to buy things to work, and people only can buy things if they have money, and people only have money when they have work - but everyone is laying off people left and right due to "AI".
The other issue is that there's trillions of dollars floating around between all the companies. It is likely that a significant chunk of these will fail and give us another 2007.
We'll be out of work whilst bailing out these companies with printed money and another round of inflation. The middle class will cease to exist. But hey the stock market will show higher numbers so its all good.
RAM price and electricity price increases are already inflation.
The damage is not merely in the increased demand for electricity. Actually, assuming governments get their heads out of the sand about energy poverty, cheap solar, wind, and batteries will fix that. The real problem is all the other crowding-out of investment that having one big megahit technology can do.
Let's say you're an alchemist living in ancient China. You discover some kind of strange material made out of melted sand and want to sell some of it as a drinking vessel. One problem: everyone already uses porcelain for that purpose, which holds hot drinks without cracking like your strange sand ones do. So you toss that in the trash and move onto the next attempt at making an elixir of life.
Problem is, what you invented was a kind of glass; which has no economic niche in the society you live in. Some funny other places in the far west might invent it, though - hell, they might even figure out that you can grind this material down into lenses and discover an entire field of magic - optics - that you discarded because nobody needed tea cups that crack when you put tea in them.
Now, let's say you live in a society that has access to some kind of artificial intelligence. You are going to chuck the AI at absolutely everything, because on average, it tends to be better at all the problems you throw at it. Even simple things like spell-checkers get turned into AI invocations because, well, the Bitter Lesson dictates that having enough compute and learning to throw at the problem will always yield a better result than hard-coded nonsense logic that demos well. And even if you want to, well, you couldn't afford the RAM to run modern vibe-coded slop software anyway. Porcelain crowds out investment in glass, and as a result, we are limited to only having technologies that can be made by or from a pile of stolen books tied together with a bunch of matrix multiplies.
> Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill do you think goes to spending on those transformers
It's not just about the price of transformers (which have gone up!), lead times have gone up too - any infrastructure project involving transformers will be delayed by varying amounts - including grid-connected solar, at a time when energy prices are going insane.
> 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".
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.
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!
I was picking up DDR3 16GB sticks for $5/piece on eBay last year. The world has gone mad.
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.
While DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.
I wanted to buy another one and they are like $90 now :(
Personally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.
Unbelievably, even DDR3 isn't spared. Our suppliers have been quoting us much higher prices for DDR3 for months now, and we're experiencing persistent stock shortages. Fabs are abandoning legacy nodes to prioritize AI capacity, making it rough even for maintaining old gear.
It isn't really unbelievable. Anyone who could sub in DDR4 for their projects would do so which increased the price. And then anyone who was still using DDR4 for projects would respond to the increased price by moving to cheaper DDR3 if they could. It wouldn't take much of an unexpected demand increase to move the needle since I don't believe much DDR3 or DDR4 is even being manufactured anymore. And then you have the supply side: Increased prices of upgrades will cause many of them to be delayed or cancelled denying the refurb/used market supply of the old hardware.
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)
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...
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.
> that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling
they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.
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.
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.
I'm sure there are things local models are good enough at in non-coding work, but for anything complex I do not find this to be the case.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
I don't know what kind of coding, but for my case it's been useless. Not working code almost every time. It's much quicker to just write it by hand than use that model.
I've been experimenting with Qwen3 Coder Next and Copilot for a little Rust toy project and it's been trucking along. It does require a fair bit of hand-holding (or perhaps I just don't trust it to give it larger tasks), but it works alright.
Give 3.5 or 3.6 a shot. 3.5 has smaller models that you could leverage. If you can swing it, though, 3.6 27B is quite good.
I get results comparable to the saas. Maybe Anthropic sold you too much crack tokens.
I suspect that a lot of people are ignoring the shift to a model where you feed entire specifications to a group of models in differing configurations controlling different aspects of the development task. In that model it doesn't really matter how fast the tokens are generated, only that they are eventually generated and that the assembly is good enough. It's a specification compiler at that point.
Multi-agent bread and butter.
isn't that literally all output an LLM generates?
That's all LLMs can give you anyway.
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.
And honestly, we will have much bigger problems if that bubble pops in a spectacular fashion.
Which problems would that be? Nasdaq crashing by a few percent and a major player to go under. Seems almost inevitable at some point.
And taking everyone's 401ks down with them because of the idiotic rules changes to accommodate SpaceX? Its going to be the largest transfer (theft) of wealth since 2008. AI is the only thing driving any kind of growth in the market at all now. That pops, its going to bring the entire economy down with it.
The vast majority of index funds are float adjusted. SpaceX will not have that many shares available relative to the total value of the company. It's a negligible percent of the overall market cap of say, VTI. This commonly repeated trope is misinformation. The change in rules is more of a problem than the actual value.
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.
I’d gladly take a few of these self-contained rack-clusters off their hands when they do.
I’d even get a house with a garage or something just for that.
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.
We're talking trillions here. They will absolutely have to make it work, whatever it takes.
You are saying there will be even more demand for RAM and that will cause the prices to crash?
Perhaps all hobbyst developers interested in local AI combined is a smaller demand than AI companies hoarding parts. That would make demand decrease.
Exactly, AI firms can and will pay premium to hoard, and without that pressure hobbyists and regular users will let demand slide down to "normal" levels.
Except, Chinese firms have entered the market now to capture the public market while the "top tier" firms supply AI firms. If the AI firms stops buying everything the toptier firms will come back into a market that has begun to be overrun by cheaper Chinese alternatives. It could get damn bloody (but good for consumers).
Lots of cheap chinese RAM is exactly what we need right now. RAM used to be cheap, it was a common excuse for not optimizing software 10 years ago ("this thing is cheap, don't worry about Electron!")
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.
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.
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.
My point is that dram demand is mostly orthogonal to whether everyone is using open weight models or secret weight models. Heavy demand for local models (whether secret or open weight) will require even more aggregate DRAM than for shared.
Demand will only go down if people reduce their use of these AI tools. Given how much folks here complain about quotas, I'm very skeptical that will happen willingly.
Open weight models allow for repurposing existing hardware locally, and there's a lot of it around - far more than the amount of new RAM being supplied. So they add some short-term downward pressure to the price. (But not very much, since these datacenter builds are long-term investments that are targeted at eventually running far larger models.)
If regular people can repurpose old hardware, so can shared providers, who can extract more value from the hardware and thus afford to pay more.
In a constrained market, supply and demand favors folks who can most efficiently extract rent. Local models only make sense in a world with abundant compute and energy.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
A Steam Deck is as vital as food or fuel...?
I feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.
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.
Instead of buying local hardware, I should give money to data centres? Aren't data centres the ones ramping up prices for everyone else?
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.
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.
"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.
I haven't watched those movies in a while. Can I get an explanation on those a.k.a.s?
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.
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).
>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.
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.
I assume you're not in the Seattle area?
Edit: Pittsburgh
That assumption is correct.
Why don’t you part them out? The market for the parts will be more liquid. You might sell faster and at a higher price. You could try doing it once and see how it goes.
I've seriously considered doing that. Since they're still under warranty for another year or two, I've decided not to... for the time being.
13th gen, and they still have VGA out? Amazing.
The only thing I've found that's annoying with these POS/Office builds across various brands and models from 2013-2017 is the PSUs are less reliable and end up failing if you're doing more than just running excel and outlook. The OEM PSUs are often priced at ~25-70% of the value of the entire machine. I've seen some people end up cutting a hole in the case and bolt an ATX PSU to the exterior.
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.
Settle for a modest 2TB and spend the rest on ice cream during your rides.
Even spinning metal has gone through the roof even on refurb and server pulls.
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.
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
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.
Shame I have 2TiB of ECC DDR4 lying around :(
Would be nice to be able to own property.
People used to mock "you'll own nothing" as conspiracy theory.
Yoo, what about the "and be happy" part???
You can probably get a mansion in France for that.
Better to get rid of that stuff now unless it’s fast. You can get used 2666 DDR4 for about $200/64 GiB stick.
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.
They need to sell something. I bet sales of DDR5 related stuff are down.
That's literally the same chip. With pricing being whatever, who cares which one they revive.
It also was the same chip back then and the price difference significant. But maybe you are correct and with the current conditions it doesn't make a difference. I dont know.
Everyone re-releasing their old crap. Nvidia is remaking the 3060 too I believe because they can use cheaper older RAM on it.
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.
You're right. Even my 2080ti is really great for gaming, Photoshop etc, and that's roughly the same as the 3060. Even does pretty good on smaller LLMs.
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
A laptop with a 226v/256v cost around the same than the "cheap" Mac Neo and can play most games (old games native/new games with AI scaling)
Agreed. I'm actually using nothing newer than 2018 and you get a ton of bang-for-your-buck with this old stuff still. I have a 2080ti and it plays a lot of fairly recent games pretty nicely.
I'm just waiting for Zhaoxin to break into the international market with something
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...
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.
I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.
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.
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
Some might call this a boomer build but the 4790k is an absolute beast of a CPU and still holds up.
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.
That makes sense. I'm on Windows 10 LTSC so I don't get nags and scare screens from Microsoft as much as a regular machine might.
> Windows it would nag me to update but apparently the CPU is too old for new Windows
When I was trying to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 I got the same warning. It is the reason why I'm now happily running Xubuntu on the same machine.
I did end up installing a Windows 11 VM (VirtualBox) which works perfectly fine running as a guest under Xubuntu on a 4790k (screw you Microsoft). But I otherwise never want go back to Windows as a daily driver. The enshittification just got too much for me.
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.
2080? I'm still using a 1070. That thing rocks
1070 as well. Probably one of the best ROIs from a single component
<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.
it's also a capable local inference stack!
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.
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.
I suppose if you turn off ray tracing and don't mind 1900x1200. I'm trying to push 1440p w/ ray tracing. Sometimes 4k if it's a good TV game. I'm constantly having to turn settings down to get >60 fps. These days more and more games seem like they expect some sort of ray tracing to get the full experience.
It's also quite nice to actually hit 165 fps in some less demanding games on my 165 hz monitor.
I guess you and the other poster just have different standards.
I've personally never found Ray Tracing to be worth the performance impact. I have a 3090 and a 7900 XT at home, on different computers. When opening a new game, I just keep everything on Medium, turn RT off if possible, and enjoy good fps at 4K in most games.
Doom The Dark Ages was the only one that didn't perform as well as I'd like. Still, perfectly playable at 1080p, Medium settings, targeting 120+ fps.
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.
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.
If I could buy a 1080p RGB stripe OLED for my next monitor, I would.
Not just "rather overrated", it's completely overrated. There just isn't a big difference in visual quality with 4k. It is primarily driven by companies trying to sell gear, not by it actually looking better.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A fab for high end memory costs $20B and 5 years to build.
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
Sometime I wish China had capacity to manufacture RAM. They would build fab within 1 year..
They do, it’s called CXMT and they are making RAM under contract for Corsair
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has warned Samsung and SK Hynix they could face 100% tariffs, framing it as a choice between paying a 100% tariff or building memory fabs in America...
Punishing instead of supporting.
Who cares about America. American tech bros created the problem.
Do tariff threats still matter? After being struck down, I thought the only new tariffs which could happen would have to be enacted by Congress? Or world that be a fun game where the new illegal tariffs would be on the books until the courts invalidate them again?
Also YMTC.
Am I missing something?
https://techwireasia.com/2026/04/chinese-memory-chips-ymtc-c...
https://wccftech.com/another-chinese-dram-maker-breaks-into-...
It will only happen if the bottom doesn't fall out of the market for AI datacenters in the next few months.
It's coming up on a year since the crisis started and at every single point it's been "next few months"
$20B is like pocket money at the scale the whole industry is moving.
Yes but you can't get away from a 5 year timeline, and then you have to project how many other fabs will be opening
So far haven't we seen the opposite? Consumer focused ram production shutting down to make more volume for server dimms or etc?
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).
The fabs are the same and are the actual bottleneck. The chips are different for CPUs and GPUs.
What do you mean? RAM manufacturers shifting their capacities to server RAM and HBM is exactly what’s happening.
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.
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.
And? The primary goal should be to catch and stop pollution, not make manufacturers spend years promising not to do something they're not allowed to do. If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
> If someone wants to build a factory that can't operate without illegal emissions, then so be it. It's their money lost. All that matters is that they don't actually pollute.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
First of all I disagree that it's difficult to get injunctions to stop an activity that was illegal from the start. In fact, sometimes environmental reviews can backfire because they typically require affirmation by the government, which can create a defense to doing something that would otherwise be judged illegal. That type of loophole is why people are so cynical.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
The plan details how those chemical storage tanks are designed and constructed. The monitoring, in place, the contingency plans.
It raises the stakes, Obviously they can still cheat but now it's a matter of criminal negligence not civil law.
Sure, but in terms of expenditure and especially time (and time is a huge expense because of the cost of raising and securing financing) that work doesn't make up the bulk of the cost. There's nothing wrong with impact statements themselves. You need independent assessments of hazards beyond the well known ones like chemical storage, where in most cases existing codes and regulations are more than adequate. It's that in many places, California especially, there's no fixed goal post. The review process has effectively become a vehicle for local and even national politics to play out. And a method for detractors to spread FUD (again especially in California where anyone, not just officials or local residents, can challenge and drag out review of an impact statement itself, let alone proposed mitigations). Just look at what has happened with CaHSR (they're still not completely done getting write-off on all the necessary impact statements for the planned route) or the politics involved with approving offshore wind farms, where Trump and, to a lesser extent, the Biden administration showed how much pure politics plays into things and drives costs up. (And federal EIP review process is, at least historically, much simpler and less subject to political games compared to some state analogs.)
The maxim, "a nation of laws, not of men", is applicable here. If you don't have fixed goal posts or rules, governance becomes chaotic, not to mention unjust, inefficient, and ultimately corrupt (so many people like Trump because he promises to substitute his own judgement in place of democratic processes).
It would be nice if we could comprehensively hypothesis and address every possible manner in which things could wrong, but we can't. Most of the time you need to rely on broad rules, at least as a catchall, like don't harm someone or don't pollute, and ensure fast, consistent, and efficient accountability when injuries occur. The current state of development approval has become grossly degenerate in many places. In others it could definitely use some firming up. But let's not pretend that a project in California would get away with most of the stuff they can in Louisiana just because we reformed the review process. For one thing, California is much better about enforcing existing hazard codes at both the planning approval and operational stages.
Environmental review is just part of the permitting by state and local authorities. you could completely get rid of it and still not get your permits. I agree with many of your points but you are railing against the wrong culprit.
The process is there because Industry has proven that it can't be trusted. The only way to stop it is to verify that it won't happen in the first place by making sure their building plans are up to par. The song-and-dance, well even with the review, they try their damn hardest to cut corners and hood-wig wherever they can.
The main blocker was that there were bats there so they needed to buy separate land to preserve. 20k pages of environmental review is just make work to spend money and create an unnecessary paper trail. If polluting with x is illegal then its illegal. The review doesnt stop that.
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.
Oh, yeah, we are in this calamity because of government interference, not unbridled capitalism. Sure.
'Unbridled capitalism' is why the RAM exists in the first place, along with the computer or phone you typed that on.
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.
Fortunately RAM is largely a commodity and more for sale only in China means more for sale elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
With China’s CXMT and YMTC it’s now going to be five again.
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.
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.
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...
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.
EBay works fine
To me, this is just one more thing that makes the current times we live in "not fun".
The demise of personal computing. All according to plan
Crazy... I hope this is temporary. If this is the new normal, we're all going to be priced out of computers eventually.
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.
What's the theory of the conspiracy here?
AI first "hardware."
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-...
Micron has exited the consumer business, so this is only till stocks last: https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
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!
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?
DRAM prices were in the stratosphere late last year, pre-dating the Iran war by 4+ months.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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...
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?
At one point I remember DDR2 ECC coating like $150-$180
Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.
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.
> 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.
I could sell you some tulips
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)
I bought 64GB of DDR4 in December of '24. Best timing-the-market of my life.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
GPU prices have gone 5-10% down in the last month.
They are still too high. You can't buy any desirable GPU like a 5090 at MSRP.
"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.
Well, if this helps back to native, less Electron bloat, great.
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.
Maybe we can start to become a little less profligate with our memory usage.
There certainly is lots and lots of potential.
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.
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.
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.
I'm curious, how is Apple seemingly unaffected by this RAM supply crunch? Why are they not increasing prices 2x/3x?
Not just AI, tariffs also affect price.
RAM is used outside of the US as well.
Really? Wow, thanks for that!
8G ought to be enough for anybody.
This but unironically. As long as "anybody" means "any developer dogfooding their own program"
I bought 96gb (2x48gb) of relatively high speed DDR5 last year for about that price... the price inflation on ram and storage is insane.
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.
Hobbyist computing is dead for the foreseeable future. These prices are untenable.
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.
I just bought 128gb ecc ram ddr4 2667mhz $850 which indeed was +50% of purchase.
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!
Man, I remember my first 8MB cost over $400.
Does anyone know when will prices for RAM and drives drop to 2025 levels?
The question is to buy or wait.
No.
I am counting my blessings after updating my and my wife's gaming PCs right before all of this happened.
It’s time to bring back all the old software hacks that were so common in the 90s
Like SoftRAM? ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
They’d have killed today if they were AI first
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.
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...
Take your ram budget, buy micron stock, wait a few days, sell it and buy ram lol
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.
Can we just go back to pre-AI world?
Can we just go back to pre-{anything-here} world?
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.
good way to get us a in a singularity
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.
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.
> People want this, the demand is there.
It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun.
That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.
We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
It's very, very questionable if people want the situation we have. I have yet to meet anyone in person who is really excited about AI. Of course it's useful, but at this cost?
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
I unfortunately have met a few. I have one friend that legit scares me... we saw how people reacted to o4 being discontinued.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
Talk to more people?
I talk to my Uber driver whenever I'm visiting somewhere, and yes, some of them are actually excited about AI.
There is certainly a lot of demand at the current price of free or subsidised subscriptions. It remains to be seen what the demand is at profitable prices.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
You're wrong. There is demand. More and more people are exploring AI and getting real work done with it.
It's like how some people like listening to Ed Sheeran. So yes, there is demand. But nobody is "getting real work done" with these toy AI models.
Real AI is a geo-political threat, and will not be allowed to exist for the average person. So, enjoy your toy AI models, because that's all you're getting.
I'm sorry friend, but you're sounding out of touch here. People are getting real work done all day every day.
Like using it finally be able to do warcrimes without any human pulling the trigger, along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...
Perhaps, then, Hamas will finally disarm?
Walk around a university campus at peek at students' laptops and you will find 90%+ of them in the middle of a conversation with a chatbot.
Do they?
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
Regret not buying more RAM last summer. And SSD:s as well. Prices are silly.
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.
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...
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.
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
$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."
that’s what I get for not clicking through TFA
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
One would think the CPU prices would drop as RAM crunches PC sales, but apparently not
Crap I regret never buying DDR5. Now I'm stuck on AM4. For now no issue but it can't last too long.
I fucking hate AI
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.
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.
Must feed the AI slop machines!!
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 ?
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).
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%...
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+%.