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

Grim5 said:
4800 WTF lol that's poor
3600 I'm ded
Click to expand...
It's not poor when your use case requires large amounts of RAM. So 64GB (4x16GB), 128GB (4x32GB), 192GB (4x48GB) or 256GB (4x64GB) users are limited by many areas, so it usually defaults to 3600MT and you can't push more from them, even if you had 6000MT RAM at those amounts (not all IMC + Motherboard was able to do so). Being able to push to 4800MT (or from some reports, those with the higher end boards and the 9000 CPUs to 6000MT with tinkering) is massive.
 
3600 is under JEDEC though that's DDR4 speed

But usually use cases that need 192gb of RAM for example don't need fast memory it's just the amount they need so I can understand if you don't care about speed, it's not gaming you're doing
 
Last edited:
LostCorpse said:
well, i guess the question is, if your memory dies for some reason what are you going to do? stop playing/using computer or get the bare minimum you need?
Click to expand...

I guess most people would get the minimum, likely only 1 of 2 sticks fail so you either run with 1 or buy a second.

I'm still on DDR4 and have some backup DIMMS so all good for the next couple of years.
 
The point is, whether gaming or otherwise - with that update in your BIOS, you could poor mans approach to upgrade RAM capacity (4 lower capacity DIMMs instead of 2 or 4 high capacity ones), especially if you've already got x2 already.

Since the prices are just going up and unlikely to be coming down any time soon (years). So it's more an alternative route for increasing capactiy or making the most of performance with the situation in hand.
 
There are rumours that tech manufacturers are using multiple approaches to navigate the issue

They include price increases but also hardware downgrades - there is word that many mid range Android phones will be getting ram downgrades next year - 12GB phones going back to 8GB for example and 8GB phones going down to 4GBand high end phones will see no RAM capacity increases and face price rises. Then there is also rumours of all next gen consoles getting delayed because they view their customer as too price sensitive and would rather delay launching products until ram prices come down in a few years. Laptops will see the same as phones - any high end laptop will get price increases and any entry and mid range laptop will see its ram capacity get cut
 
Last edited:
I feel a bit bad complaining about RAM prices when in 2006 I spent £606 on 4GB of OCZ PC2-8000 Titanium Alpha XTC... or over £1000 in today's money... though I did end up returning it for RAM at half the price (can't remember what I replaced it with now - think it was actually a G.Skills set) but only because one of the Titanium sticks was DOA and there was no more stock of it :s

But when the RAM I bought 2 years ago is now 4x the price something is very wrong in the world and it is going to hurt a lot of things.
 
Last edited:
Grim5 said:
There are rumours that tech manufacturers are using multiple approaches to navigate the issue

They include price increases but also hardware downgrades - there is word that many mid range Android phones will be getting ram downgrades next year - 12GB phones going back to 8GB for example and 8GB phones going down to 4GBand high end phones will see no RAM capacity increases and face price rises. Then there is also rumours of all next gen consoles getting delayed because they view their customer as too price sensitive and would rather delay launching products until ram prices come down in a few years. Laptops will see the same as phones - any high end laptop will get price increases and any entry and mid range laptop will see its ram capacity get cut
Click to expand...
basically covid then. :/
 
Rroff said:
I feel a bit bad complaining about RAM prices when in 2006 I spent £606 on 4GB of OCZ PC2-8000 Titanium Alpha XTC... or over £1000 in today's money... though I did end up returning it for RAM at half the price (can't remember what I replaced it with now - think it was actually a G.Skills set) but only because one of the Titanium sticks was DOA and there was no more stock of it :s

But when the RAM I bought 2 years ago is now 4x the price something is very wrong in the world and it is going to hurt a lot of things.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't feel bad when you're talking about enthusiast kit - we know that the price/performance curve isn't linear especially at the top end, and some pay that willingly to have the undisputed best whatever it is.
 
I just bought TeamGroup 32gb ddr5 7200 MHz for 300 quid!
Returned the dominator ram.
I heard prices will probably start going down in 2nd half of 2026.
 
Last edited:
I think the driving force behind the current RAM shortage is that OpenAI alone is buying up something like 40% of the unprocessed wafer output (probably for their Sora service), and I suspect a good chunk of the remaining 60% is being bought up by other AI companies. They're essentially hoarding unprocessed RAM with the intention that they'll use it in the future for new datacentres.

AI has some good uses, for example in medical and scientific areas, but I think it's just wrong that companies are buying up RAM so that people can generate cat-themed slop content, when this RAM would be much better off being used in personal systems for things such as gaming. I believe AI video generation needs significantly more RAM and GPUs than what things such as ChatGPT do. You can run a basic open source AI chatbot model such as the 12 billion parameter version of Google's Gemma 3 offline on just 16GB of RAM, and it performs about as well as what the original version of ChatGPT did. The current ChatGPT model (which is proprietary so the exact details aren't known) likely needs around 1-2TB of RAM, but if you factor running on a server with a few powerful GPUs it can probably process lots of requests from different users at once. AI video generation meanwhile is significantly more resource intensive - I had a look at one of the most basic AI video models that was capable of running offline on 16GB RAM and it appeared it would take probably days to generate a shortish clip on the Apple M3 processor. By comparison the 12 billion parameter Gemma 3 model can output a reply to a request on the base Apple M3 within a few seconds.

Personally I feel that there needs to be legislation passed to prevent AI companies from preemptively hoarding wafers that they don't plan to immediately use. This would help ease the current RAM shortage and do more to help protect consumers from short supply and price gouging. Unfortunately given the current state of things, this seems unlikely.
 
AI is just being used as a excuse to drive up the prices lol. couldnt give it away recently. just trying to price hike it up.even videos about showing the ai places arent buying it all up. just like nvidia with cards. doing rebate two weeks ago then shutting down fabrication. why do rebates when you shutting down fabrication ? its cause they got surplus stock and going to milk it all the way.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
AI is just being used as a excuse to drive up the prices lol. couldnt give it away recently. just trying to price hike it up.even videos about showing the ai places arent buying it all up. just like nvidia with cards. doing rebate two weeks ago then shutting down fabrication. why do rebates when you shutting down fabrication ? its cause they got surplus stock and going to milk it all the way.
Click to expand...

I’m not sure that’s exactly the case TBH. AI models are simply becoming huge!
 
AMDPower said:
ASUS has been making phones since mid 2000's, they are more prolific in Asia than here. I have a feeling we are going to see a lot of companies going the same way this year.
Click to expand...
I must admit I actually knew they did, or used to, but I haven't seen anyone with one for years and years. Like you said, bigger in the Far East.
 
AMDPower said:
ASUS has been making phones since mid 2000's, they are more prolific in Asia than here. I have a feeling we are going to see a lot of companies going the same way this year.
Click to expand...

I doubt it as the cost for many new phone sales is wrapped into a 18 or 25 months contract.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom