DRAM Prices Surge 172% YoY with No Signs of Slowing Down

yeah ddr4 has been slowly creeping up for a few months
a lot of people I'm guessing are either going for a highish end ddr4 based setup if doing a new build
and others are just upgrading the ddr4 system they already have and maxxing that out because this
is now more achievable than a ddr5 based system. hence why 5700x3d/5800x3d and other desirable
ddr4 cpus [and other parts I'm guessing] are now at prices that without context wouldn't make much
sense.
 
Aurhinius said:
That is quite possible that it won't go back down but I honestly find myself asking what are people using all this AI for. I mean it's hardly ground breaking stuff and I don't really use it that much so where is the market....I mean ChatGPT, Copilot are okay but not earth shattering.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think all of this is rather amateur/premature TBH. It's not like they've got anything revolutionary? It's mainly just time saving stuff/ways to cut off humans being paid for tasks, at best.

iu
 
aaronyuri said:
Probably never. The days of cheap RAM have joined the days of cheap GPUs; it will now be a thing of the past.
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XX90 Series aside - which lets face it, is a niche luxury market (just like super cars versus sports cars) GPU's have never been cheap, ever. They're the most expensive part of any build, and always have been.

Using/building/buying a PC for gaming, is a luxury, not a right.
If someone doesn't like the price, they buy a console, just like they always have done.
It is what it is with a GPU, if you want high FPS, high resolution, you pay for it, just like if you want a fast car. Neither of which you need.

Unless it's work related stuff, but then the company would pay for that, so it's irrelevant to the employee as a cost factor.

People that act sour because they 'need' to do casual video editing/rendering etc as a hobby, do it by choice, and if it's too expensive, then too bad, it's not a necessity, it's a hobby, and they're probably better off with a Mac for that anyway :)

Where as everything else required for a PC, such as a RAM, is required for it to function and do anything. So we need those parts, and not to be ripped off. So there is a difference when it comes to what to be angry about.
 
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Deleted member 280263 said:
XX90 Series aside - which lets face it, is a niche luxury market (just like super cars versus sports cars) GPU's have never been cheap, ever. They're the most expensive part of any build, and always have been.

Using/building/buying a PC for gaming, is a luxury, not a right.
If someone doesn't like the price, they buy a console, just like they always have done.
It is what it is with a GPU, if you want high FPS, high resolution, you pay for it, just like if you want a fast car. Neither of which you need.

Unless it's work related stuff, but then the company would pay for that, so it's irrelevant to the employee as a cost factor.

People that act sour because they 'need' to do casual video editing/rendering etc as a hobby, do it by choice, and if it's too expensive, then too bad, it's not a necessity, it's a hobby, and they're probably better off with a Mac for that anyway :)

Where as everything else required for a PC, such as a RAM, is required for it to function and do anything. So we need those parts, and not to be ripped off. So there is a difference when it comes to what to be angry about.
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It's relative and depends what your comparison is. If you set it against the cost of a rig, yes, GPUs are the most expensive component. However, that doesn't change that GPUs have increased in price as the years have gone by. An ultra high end GPU is now astronomically more expensive than one from 20 years ago.

I paid £300 for an X1950XTX back in 2006. That's £523 today based on inflation. In reality, a mid range GPU is now circa £500 (9070/5070). GPUs have gotten expensive.

CPUs as a comparison haven't moved much at all - they've arguably gotten cheaper. An i7 920 was £290 back in 2008. That was a high-end desktop CPU at the time and quite a premium over standard desktop parts. That's £490 in today's money. You can easily pick up a 9800X/9900X or 265k for less, and they are that same above standard desktop class CPU.
 
At the start of 2019 I paid an eye watering £120 or so for 2 x 8 GB of CL15 3000MHz DDR4 during a RAM price peak. A year and a bit ago, I decided to buy a rather pointless but cheap upgrade of another 2 x 8 GB of matching DDR4 sticks second hand for about £35.

I'd now break even on this RAM if I sold all four sticks used today, which is unexpected.

I'm just glad my system was upgradeable to negate relatively slow RAM and PCI-E 3.0 limitations, thanks to an X3D CPU and more than enough VRAM on my GPU.

If this crisis gets bad enough, I wonder if AMD could engineer an AM5 motherboard to work with DDR4 RAM. The cache on the X3D CPUs hopefully mitigating the drastic drop in system RAM bandwidth, like it has done on AM4 :)
 
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aaronyuri said:
It's relative and depends what your comparison is. If you set it against the cost of a rig, yes, GPUs are the most expensive component. However, that doesn't change that GPUs have increased in price as the years have gone by. An ultra high end GPU is now astronomically more expensive than one from 20 years ago.

I paid £300 for an X1950XTX back in 2006. That's £523 today based on inflation. In reality, a mid range GPU is now circa £500 (9070/5070). GPUs have gotten expensive.

CPUs as a comparison haven't moved much at all - they've arguably gotten cheaper. An i7 920 was £290 back in 2008. That was a high-end desktop CPU at the time and quite a premium over standard desktop parts. That's £490 in today's money. You can easily pick up a 9800X/9900X or 265k for less, and they are that same above standard desktop class CPU.
Click to expand...

But everything you buy in general, has increased over the years; that's more my point, so it is comparable in any era, given the cost of living, what's considered a decent wage/PH pay, etc.
Thus in X year, GPU's were still a lot of money compared to their counterparts.
So nothing has changed, was more my point.

£12 an hour used to be a well paid job, now the minimum wage is more than that.

As for the X1950XTX versus today, that's only because technology has moved so far along that we can have such a variety of performance tiers/pricing, so it can seem more reasonable with what's on offer for X price point. We didn't have that advancement nor variety back then.

CPU wise, it's a mixed bag, I had a Athlon 3200+ XP back in 2004 - Hexus review back in May 2003:
"So what's it like overall? We talked about performance on the previous page. It's not as fast as new Intel gear but neither is it slow. I hinted that you should buy a lower clocked XP instead and make this processor essentially for nearly one tenth of the price. That's pretty staggering and yes this processor will be the wrong side of £400 at launch."

www.hexus.net

AMD Athlon XP 3200+

As a platform, we're pretty impressed. 200MHz front side bus can't hurt and the DDR memory infrastructure has long been in place to support the move. NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 core logic takes things forward a little and provides a good home for the new CPU.
www.hexus.net www.hexus.net

Which £400 equates to £738.61 in todays money, so I agree with you there, as that's more than a 9950X3D!
 
Cyber-Mav said:
With ram prices on the up maybe more people will switch over to retro gaming?
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I think they'll just stick with AM4. As long as you've got a 5700X3D/5800X3D, you're set for years, even with a 4090/5090 at 4K.

If anything, people will just migrate towards modern consoles, as the cost is still miles cheaper.
 
Deleted member 280263 said:
But everything you buy in general, has increased over the years; that's more my point, so it is comparable in any era, given the cost of living, what's considered a decent wage/PH pay, etc.
Thus in X year, GPU's were still a lot of money compared to their counterparts.
So nothing has changed, was more my point.

£12 an hour used to be a well paid job, now the minimum wage is more than that.

As for the X1950XTX versus today, that's only because technology has moved so far along that we can have such a variety of performance tiers/pricing, so it can seem more reasonable with what's on offer for X price point. We didn't have that advancement nor variety back then.

CPU wise, it's a mixed bag, I had a Athlon 3200+ XP back in 2004 - Hexus review back in May 2003:
"So what's it like overall? We talked about performance on the previous page. It's not as fast as new Intel gear but neither is it slow. I hinted that you should buy a lower clocked XP instead and make this processor essentially for nearly one tenth of the price. That's pretty staggering and yes this processor will be the wrong side of £400 at launch."

www.hexus.net

AMD Athlon XP 3200+

As a platform, we're pretty impressed. 200MHz front side bus can't hurt and the DDR memory infrastructure has long been in place to support the move. NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 core logic takes things forward a little and provides a good home for the new CPU.
www.hexus.net www.hexus.net

Which £400 equates to £738.61 in todays money, so I agree with you there, as that's more than a 9950X3D!
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GPUs have gotten more expensive. That statement is indisputably true. The days of high-end cards being £500 (in today's money) are long behind us. They have been cheap relative to what they cost now. If you are looking at the cost relative to the total % of a rig, sure, the GPU takes up most of it (and always has), but today it takes up even more. That is compounded further by other components becoming cheaper and GPUs continuously rising in price.

Saying "but everything else has gotten more expensive" doesn't detract from the fact that GPUs have risen in price, astronomically, from their prices of just a decade or more ago. Even the 980 Ti and 1080 Ti were £600-700. Going beyond consumer: the Titan/X/XP were around the £1k mark. That's now the price of a 5080. The 5080 hasn't suddenly become a non-consumer card in a new dress and IO panel. It's still just a high-end consumer card.

My CPU example was to provide a contrasting comparison - not everything has gotten more expensive. Storage is also another notable thing that has gotten significantly cheaper. And that's changing now, too...

The X1950XTX was the best AMD consumer card money could buy, alongside the 7900 GTX (dethroned by the 7950 GX2). It was ultra high-end and very comparable to what you can get today. There has always existed a low, mid, high, and ultra high card. There are now more tiers in between those, but the tiering has remained largely unchanged overall.

The difference now is that the GPGPU market has exploded and created an insatiable need for more compute in a smaller package with pockets far deeper than any consumer. It has created a whole new set of tiers for GPUs far beyond the dreams/needs of consumers. Thus the creation of the Instinct and H series.
 
aaronyuri said:
GPUs have gotten more expensive. That statement is indisputably true. The days of high-end cards being £500 (in today's money) are long behind us. They have been cheap relative to what they cost now. If you are looking at the cost relative to the total % of a rig, sure, the GPU takes up most of it (and always has), but today it takes up even more. That is compounded further by other components becoming cheaper and GPUs continuously rising in price.

Saying "but everything else has gotten more expensive" doesn't detract from the fact that GPUs have risen in price, astronomically, from their prices of just a decade or more ago. Even the 980 Ti and 1080 Ti were £600-700. Going beyond consumer: the Titan/X/XP were around the £1k mark. That's now the price of a 5080. The 5080 hasn't suddenly become a non-consumer card in a new dress and IO panel. It's still just a high-end consumer card.
Click to expand...

They really haven't, high-end cards were always expensive.
Remember we aren't talking about niche factor XX90 cards, as that is it's own market in itself, as I already made the point of mentioning before.

So for 'normal people' a 5080, would be the high end card currently, just the same as 'normal people' buy sports cars as a majority, and supercars as a minority.

So let's find an old school 5080 equivalent, the 8800 GTX.
The 8800 GTX in 2007, was £480 MSRP on launch, that equates to £837.45 in todays money - which is nearly double the '£500 for a high-end card' that you've claimed.

"8 November 2006, 18:58
this SKU will sell for around £480 at a host of etailers, so it's not cheap, but technology leadership rarely is.
The summary is straightforward for once. If you want the absolute fastest graphics card available, right now, the GeForce 8800 GTX is it."

Source:
www.hexus.net

ASUS EN8800GTX GeForce 8800 GTX 768MiB

If you want the fastest graphics card in town it will have to be a G80-based card. ASUS' implementation is as good as any. Recommended.
www.hexus.net www.hexus.net

£837.45 is not cheap, and not long ago 5080 could be had for £929.99 depending on the brand. I'd hardly call an increase of £92.54 in 18 years, a massive increase.

aaronyuri said:
The X1950XTX was the best AMD consumer card money could buy
Click to expand...

Just because you are selectively picking cheaper ATi cards over Nvidia, doesn't mean you are right. ATi/AMD have always been significantly cheaper than Nvidia.

Just like the 9070 XT is now compared to the 5070Ti or 5080.

They're 2 different brands, that have always been wildly different in price.

If you're going to say that, then I can easily argue that charging £579.99 currently for a 9070 XT, is no more expensive than the X1950XTX was when adjusted into today's money? The X1950XTX was £330 in 2006, which equates to £575.75 in todays money!
"Overclockers UK is currently listing the Radeon X1950XTX on pre-order for just under £330 inc VAT."

Source:
www.bit-tech.net

ATI Radeon X1950XTX | bit-tech.net

Today, ATI is launching several new video cards with a complete refresh of its product lineup. We have a look at the new flagship Radeon X1950XTX part. It comes complete with a spanking new cooler and some GDDR4 memory. Read on to find out if it's any good...
www.bit-tech.net www.bit-tech.net

So a current top end ATi/AMD card, has gone up by a whooping £4.24 in 20 years :cry:

So I stand by my point, they've always been expensive, and when translated into current inflation, it's either the same or not far off.
 
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Deleted member 280263 said:
So let's find an old school 5080 equivalent, the 8800 GTX.
The 8800 GTX in 2007, was £480 MSRP on launch, that equates to £837.45 in todays money - which is nearly double the '£500 for a high-end card' that you've claimed.

"8 November 2006, 18:58
this SKU will sell for around £480 at a host of etailers, so it's not cheap, but technology leadership rarely is.
The summary is straightforward for once. If you want the absolute fastest graphics card available, right now, the GeForce 8800 GTX is it."
Click to expand...
Bought my OCZ 8800GTX with lifetime international warranty for £300 direct from the USA, exchange rate was a lot better back then as well, around $2 vs £1.
 
Deleted member 280263 said:
If you're going to say that, then I can easily argue that charging £579.99 currently for a 9070 XT, is no more expensive than the X1950XTX was when adjusted into today's money? The X1950XTX was £330 in 2006, which equates to £575.75 in todays money!
"Overclockers UK is currently listing the Radeon X1950XTX on pre-order for just under £330 inc VAT."

Source:
www.bit-tech.net

ATI Radeon X1950XTX | bit-tech.net

Today, ATI is launching several new video cards with a complete refresh of its product lineup. We have a look at the new flagship Radeon X1950XTX part. It comes complete with a spanking new cooler and some GDDR4 memory. Read on to find out if it's any good...
www.bit-tech.net www.bit-tech.net

So a current top end ATi/AMD card, has gone up by a whooping £4.24 in 20 years :cry:
Click to expand...
No? The 9070 XT is not a high-end card. The last high-end card AMD released was the 7900XTX. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...ck-hyunh-talks-new-strategy-for-gaming-market

The 9070 XT is a mid-range card, equivalent to the 5070 Ti. £500 is the price of a mid-range card today.

Edit: and not selective. I picked an X1950XTX (and i7 920) because I bought one and knew how much I paid for it... no other reason. I care not whether you agree with me, especially not enough to attempt to contort data to my argument.
 
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