DDR5 prices are beyond belief at this point. It’s ridiculous. At present, even a moderate amount of DDR5, say 2*24Gb sticks at 6000MHz’+ even at shitty latencies costs about the same as 9950X3D2, even that price of that one is already ridiculous!
What would be optimal course of action, when planning the upgrade sometime during next 2-3 years ?
I guess this conundrum has a few edges:
hitting the worst price peaks at the worst time unneccesarilly
being slaughtered by buying high only to see price collapse at some point
getting the DDR5 only to see it being obliterated by DDR6
When is reasonable to expect price drop anyway? By 2028 ? Or later ?
Wouldn’t around that time DDR6 be expected expected to come out ?
Zen6 looks interesting (30+% per-core performance, 50% more cores, AMX extensions etc), but with those memory prices and speeds, what’s the point having it on existing AM5 ?
This probably leaves Zen7 in the game (if DDR5 prices fall by then), but that one is also expected on AM5/DDR5.
Even if RAMageddon subsides by that point, I have problem seeing how could dual-channel DDR5 on AM5 serve all of its cores (top model expected to have 32+ cores), even with double L3.
So, what would be the optimal plan, provided no immediate hurry for upgrade and with intent to use it for quite a few years after, possibly a decade ?
Bit the bullet with Zen6 ? Wait for Zen7 ? Wait extra 1-2 years for Zen8 and go with entirely new platform (AM6/PCIe6/DDR6, possibly with HBM on-die) ?
There’s a lot to chew on there. Chinese dram production will eventually start to bring prices back down maybe in a year or two, but at the same time they are probably never going to go back to where they were before. $100 or less for 32gb of ddr5 6000 was an anomaly that appeared because of massive overproduction. The main players in the market basically vowed never to make that mistake again at the same time that a new group of buyers appeared on the field saying we will take everything you can possibly produce and we will pay whatever price you ask, a situation that they could not have hoped for or dreamed of. It’s never going back.
Plus if you’re in the US, the buying power of the dollar has been eroded such that even if RAM availability equaled what it was two years ago which should result in the price we had two years ago, it would in reality probably still cost double just because the currency is worth a lot less in terms of how much raw goods you can purchase for it now. In other words, that 32gb kit that was $100 two years ago, in a perfect and highly unlikely world, might become the equivalent of $100 again, but that means it’ll actually still be $200. Fat chance it sees under $400 though.
The dual channel concerns are already a thing. I have a 9950x3d2 and 256gb of RAM and it’s damn near uselessly slow when a model needs to dip into system RAM. But anything higher than dual channel will, like high pcie lane count, probably always remain locked behind the professional workstation setups like threadripper. I don’t see them ever letting up from dual channel only on consumer platforms, especially with the AI race, because if like say for example I could get quad channel out of my 256gb of ram that I already have, that would make this thing infinitely more useful for AI workloads, and that’s why they will never do that, because now I’d have no reason to buy threadripper and ECC kits instead.
I say the plan is imagine computer hardware is now like housing post-covid: Yeah you can have it and it’s technically available, but at what cost? There is no winning plan, they all lose. No matter what, you’re paying $500k to live somewhere that someone paid $100k to live in just a few years ago, but if you want a house, that’s just the ask now. Except it’s RAM and I paid $450 for this kit when I bought it and I don’t even want to look at what it is on ebay right now. I don’t think there is a plan without major downsides or loss of money / potential risk exposure.
TLDR I went ahead and bought whatever was right in front of me and possible for me to buy right now and then everything disappeared anyway, I’d say do that if anything becomes available anywhere near MSRP. Worst case scenario you get to use it for a few months to a year and then sell it for more than you paid for it, if you can imagine that.
The consumer market is already crashing hard, we see a decline of 25% this fall with a prognosis of another 20% in the first quarter of 2027. If they keep the prices up many companies catering the consumer market will eventually be bankrupt.
At some point older stuff will be sold at a loss to free up shelf space. When will this happen? Idk. How much cheaper will stuff be? Idk.
You are not wrong. At the same time… If the market demands 512GB in two sticks, the market will get 512GB in 2 sticks. And this will then trickle down to us consumers eventually as the premium chips cost less and less to make.
Trouble is… 64GB is already more RAM than what most people need now. When you can run the entire OS minus apps on a 4GB RAM disk, and a simulation in another 8GB VM, all on RAM… Well, suffice to say I have a hard time seeing 64 GB ever reaching the average system.
… With the caveat that I am talking about current models and use cases. If we in the computing industry can find a better use for the RAM, we will. For now, the RAM is a commodity that will not be able to reach clocks higher than whatever the top clock of the CPU is (and remember, 1MHz RAM clock means 2MT). Maybe we will invent a TDR or QDR method soon with three phase information exchange, who knows.
We’ll see what happens when X3D reach 1GB on-die RAM. That is enough to run an entire OS all inside the CPU cache, with plenty of leftovers (the actual OS only takes about 128-ish MB with kernel, drivers and GPU display routines - less, if we can somehow optimize away generics, which is… kinda hard to do on consumer).
For traditional RAM though? I cannot see current usage requiring more than we have for mainstream. But OTOH, the market tends to find a way…
I don´t really think that there are many ways around it if you are in need for an platform upgrade right now.
I mean am4 and 14th gen intel can still run on ddr4 and for people with really tight budgets,
that could still be a feasible option.
However those platforms are pretty much eol and there won´t be any future upgrade ability.
So if you have to upgrade right now it´s probably going to be a matter of biting the citron,
and buy whatever amount of memory you need for top dollar.
Or just buy a lower capacity kit like 16 / 32GB which is still going to be fine for most,
home and gaming use.
And just sit the whole ram price crisis out pretty much and expand or upgrade later.
When will the entire ram prices debacle being over is anybodies guess at this point.
But at least if you life in the US near a Microcentre you could still find memory kits,
in bundles with motherboards and cpu´s and that way it´s still kinda affordable.
The thing for me is that, aside from proper ECC ram, there isn’t a shortage of supply here in Aus. Regular ol’ DDR 4 and 5 are in stock everywhere .. I checked after I saw that point made on GN (I think).
Hard drives, OTOH, are an absolute arse ache to get a hold of. SSDs too.
No there is no shortage at all indeed.
I would even think that most retailers still have plenty of old stock left from before the price hikes.
And they now just lifting on it to triple or even quadruple their profits.
The most annoying thing is that certain companies not even take rma´s anymore.
But just refund the original purchase price for a ram stick before the price hike.
which is a big F-you to the customers.
Yes up here the cheapest kit of 2x32GB is shitty 5200mhz cl40 Corsair costs €950,-.
That is just ridiculous.
I mean those kits where generally sold around the €200,- ish mark or even less.
My plan is to not buy anything with much RAM for the indefinite future.
We had COVID, a crypto boom, now an AI boom, who knows what’s around the corner. An earthquake (eg: I recall wanting to upgrade RAM back around 2000 but prices had shot up, this article says by 5x!), a war, another pandemic.
The production and pricing of these high technology items appear to be very fickle indeed.
8GB of RAM is still a lot of RAM, I imagine some forum members fondly recall 8MB being a lot. With prudent software selection we can drastically reduce the effect of Wirth’s law. I’ve taken a new interest in Alpine Linux, as my NixOS VMs keep running out of RAM
I’m sure I’ve written this on the forum somewhere else:
My view of the future is that we will be running FLOSS software and be lords of ewaste. And it will be glorious.
I don’t think it was an anomaly at all. I wrote this article a while back where I dug through all my RAM orders since 2005. Yes, we’re ignoring DDR generations, inflation/buying power of the dollar, speed, etc. But just going by raw capacity of just consumer ram, it’s always been about $3 ~ $5/GB for the past decade, except for that 2018 we all thought was bad at the time. If you do take inflation into account, it was still a depreciating asset forever.
Yea and this is the big issue. All of these companies can only buy at whatever price because of the circular debt flow everyone has talked about for months ad nauseam. All of them are losing billions. I’m waiting to read the actual Anthropic S-1 when it comes out. A lot of engineers are now dependent on this stuff. They’re addicted to the heroin. I heard OpenAI changed their $200 plan to half the usage. I bet it’s still not enough to pay for the raw compute.
There are setups of people with 4x DGX running local models, but I look at that and think, even if they bought that back in May, that’s still the price of a decent Civic. Are those people going to be in better shape to still develop with LLMs when we see more substantial price hikes?
I was against the big “cloud” moves happening in 2010 and I think we’re seeing the result of so much dependence on data centers and other peoples’ computers. People in companies no longer know how to do Postgres failover because AWS RDS is easier and safer. LLMs are producing the same cognitive kneecaps.
Yes, we had all the government planned and funded psychological operations designed to induce fear, encourage distrust among citizens and separate close friends and family over silly and near religious political grounds no one gave a shit about ten years ago. It’s absolutely amazing, and it won’t end. Not until we collectively stop believing all the propaganda distributed to us from every media venue, or the technocratic class ensure a human being can’t get a job at a grocery store without owning a cellphone of only the two required OSes and biometrics are required to board a train or airplane.
I just bought a 2019 Mac Pro off eBay with 1TB storage and 96GB of RAM for $2022 USD (including taxes and shipping). I’m working on a post on how I got Gentoo on it (with ZFS encryption and ZFSbootmenu). Remember when the base models were $6k and everyone made fun of them as the “cheese graters”?
You can run Linux on them, put in newer cards and get a decent setup going (although limited to PCI 3.x). If you buy off eBay BE SURE TO ASK THE SELLER IF ACTIVATION HAS BEEN DISABLED. I hate Apple so much. Trying to turn off secure boot greeted me with a screen asking for the password to some random iCloud account. Luckily the seller got in touch with the firm ditching this inventory and they found that guy and got him to remove all the Macs they sold with his iCloud. If it’s traded a few people, this would be impossible and fuck Apple for not releasing all the machines for the x86 architecture it no longer supports (a lot of these could also end up as e-waste down the line unless someone finds a way to break the older Intel T2 chips).
-Looks at my shitty 5200 kit because 6000 was largely unproven when AM5 launched.-
The best time to buy anything that’s increasing in price is yesterday.
You can try to time the market, but where does that potentially put you? A year, two years, a new platform? If you’re trying to save a few bucks by waiting for the ram to decrease in price, then you need to factor in other costs, such as what does having less ram cost you in terms of time, inability to do a workload faster, 5% less frames in a game?
On napkin math, doesn’t seem worth it imo. Just from a heartache standpoint. Waking up everyday, checking the news, what are ram prices today, is it going down? Should I buy now or tomorrow? Will I get my ram before the world ends? But there’s rumors zen9 is launching.
Seems stressful.
I’d just buy it. If it’s something you truly need, the price doesn’t matter.
I built my AM5 computer the week it launched. This was on the tail end of the gpu fiasco, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to build a computer that would be solid for the next 7+ years.
(I say all this framed on the upgrade mentioned happening in 2-3 years, not today.)
I recently found out about STRATA and realized I could finally run a half decent LLM on my workstation’s 12GB VRAM A3000. All i needed was 64GB ram, and when i bought this Lenovo P360 Ultra at half price special a couple years back I had spec’d a single 32CG DDR5, so a couple hundred bux and life is good, right? OOPS… found out RAM price reality (ouch!)
Best i could find anywhere was $522 for a used pull on Ebay. (Identical Samsung chip to what I had) Bit the bullet, and Im glad I did. Eating ramen for a few more months, but I am getting more useful work done with that 64G of dusl channel…
Buy a Microcenter bundle if you are in the United States (CPU, Motherboard & RAM).
Otherwise buy what you need and use it because that is just the cost of the equipment now, especially with a supposed 75%+ of 2027 memory production being already allocated of big buyers, similar story for HDDs, SSDs and CPUs (though the last is more about Server & Workstation oriented CPUs, plus low consumer demand is keeping them in stock on the consumer end). Companies like Micron are making record profits, they don’t even truly need to release a new GPU series, a new CPU lineup, new memory standard or anything else.
Or go slightly older generation Epyc, TR, Xenon, Core i, or Ryzen if you don’t need PCIe 5.0 and other modern benefits.
I would expect major pricing & availability issues for the next 3-5 years, and it would probably just be going down to early-mid 2026 prices when it eventually gets better, not early 2025 prices… The good consumer market, and affordable modern home lab hobby, are done, it’s now an expensive hobby or one where you are forced to use over priced used last generation equipment (or multi generation old)
Don’t forget that if DDR6 wafer yields are good, they will pretty much switch over to that and almost stop DDR5 production, just like the switch from DDR4 to DDR5. So DDR5 will be more of a used or primarily old stock item at that point and prices may or may not go down.
