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

fuzzylogic said:
I need to upgrade a PC that's on its last legs (currently relegated to being a competent media server), and the plan was to build a decent games machine. I'm not sure whether to eat the prices and buy now or just nope out until 2027.
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buy a cheap laptop for work related stuff if needed and ps5 pro for gaming and thank me later, that is unless you need a powerful pc for specific reason. Most pc games are console ports now day and I have both a gaming pc and ps5 and mostly use it to game on and pc for work stuff. Most of the PC games are on the PlayStation and with prices rising so fast just dont see the point.

I now understand why valve are releasing the steam machine, the market condition over the next year might just be right for them to take market share from both console and pc gaming if they price is correctly. Think of it this way for the price of 64GB ram you can almost buy a mid tier laptop and ps5 pro. What crazy times, but be quick because ps5 pro prices will rise.
 
Heard from our Dell rep today (third largest org on the continent so our rep is usually very honest with us as it pays to be) and he said that we're heading into a hardware shortage that's going to be covid level so any ICT planning needs to factor that in :(
 
I guess with the GPU apocalypse it was one thing, but RAM is in just about everything (sort of, you know what I mean) so I can see how it'll cause shortages all over the place.
 
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I was really tempted to buy a new machine and use my current for a dedicated sim rig next year.

Guess that has been put on hold a couple of years.

Thing is the entire market will suffer. Sales of other components will decline as no one wants to spend £600 on RAM to build a new machine.
 
Skynet5 said:
I was really tempted to buy a new machine and use my current for a dedicated sim rig next year.

Guess that has been put on hold a couple of years.

Thing is the entire market will suffer. Sales of other components will decline as no one wants to spend £600 on RAM to build a new machine.
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A lot of hardware vendors are going to go out of business in the next year, for sure. But I think the biggest issue will be supply. Even those who have the money to spend £1000 on 64GB of DDR5 (a price I fully expect to see in 2026) will find there's no stock anywhere, because every DRAM die is going to AI and datacentre customers.

Micron shutting down Crucial is the canary in the coalmine. There's no point in having a consumer brand because there isn't going to be any DRAM or flash available to sell to the consumer market.
 
2026 is going to be very rubbish for us PC enthusiasts. It's likely to have serious knock-on effects in the console and consumer electronics space too. Everything needs RAM.
 
Skynet5 said:
I was really tempted to buy a new machine and use my current for a dedicated sim rig next year.

Guess that has been put on hold a couple of years.

Thing is the entire market will suffer. Sales of other components will decline as no one wants to spend £600 on RAM to build a new machine.
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Overclockers UK and the rest of them could go out of business.
 
Nelly said:
Overclockers UK and the rest of them could go out of business.
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The last time this happened, there were more bundles, like PSU and graphics card (both for retailers and buyers) to ensure they could shift other stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more CPU, motherboard and RAM bundles, even coming from/incentivised by AMD/intel themselves.

Some desperate buyers even got a pre-built PC, just to take the graphics card out and sell the rest. If RAM keeps climbing, that's going to happen again.

I wonder if other parts of the market may get a lot more money coming toward them too, like mice/keyboards, monitors, chairs, cases and branded stuff like the Reva card.
 
i wouldn't be surprised that in the next few months, we'd be adding another £400 or more, to a build just for the extra cost of the ram/gpu/ssd
for a midrange build (eg ryzen 9600/32gb ram/1tb ssd/9060xt 16gb), that's going from £1200 to £1600....that's a 25% increase!
that same £1600 just a couple months ago would have netted a 9800x3d and a 9070xt.
absolutely cray cray :(

(also one of the reasons why i've stopped speccing. cannot in good conscience spec anything :/ )
 
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Going to have a serious impact on PC retailers/builders. Think how bad pricing is going to be in a few months time. I can’t imagine how much the cost of a normal-ish laptop or mini-PC will be going up.
Without storage/memory, a computer isn’t very useful.
 
Tetras said:
The last time this happened, there were more bundles, like PSU and graphics card (both for retailers and buyers) to ensure they could shift other stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more CPU, motherboard and RAM bundles, even coming from/incentivised by AMD/intel themselves.

Some desperate buyers even got a pre-built PC, just to take the graphics card out and sell the rest. If RAM keeps climbing, that's going to happen again.

I wonder if other parts of the market may get a lot more money coming toward them too, like mice/keyboards, monitors, chairs, cases and branded stuff like the Reva card.
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Or retailers do the same and focus on corporate deals....
 
fuzzylogic said:
I need to upgrade a PC that's on its last legs (currently relegated to being a competent media server), and the plan was to build a decent games machine. I'm not sure whether to eat the prices and buy now or just nope out until 2027.
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It really depends on your situation. Do you really need a PC right now, or can you put it off? Are you willing to eat another couple of hundred quid on a two grand build (as I did a couple of weeks ago) or are you willing to cut down the amount or spec of RAM you want? Of course that extra 10 percent I paid on top for the whole price of a rig a couple of weeks ago is now an extra 25-30 percent, and that may be a bridge too far for you. There's always something new and better just over the horizon, there's always some component shortage and price gouging that is a step to far that puts you off. I started talking about a new PC about seven years ago, and have only just been willing to pull the trigger after crypto-currency, machine learning, pandemic, graphics cards price gouging and now the RAM-pocalypse, priced me out of what I was willing to pay verses what I wanted.

You may be able to hunt around and find someone selling older stock at a less outrageous price, or be willing to go for second-hand, but that window is fast closing if not already gone. No one really has any idea what is going to happen in the future, and things are only going to get worse until the AI bubble pops, but the big tech companies are pouring billions into trying to make that bubble grow instead. If/when the bubble does pop, we'll all have bigger things to worry about.
 
~Divine~Wind~ said:

Is this the death of crucial?
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No, they are just selling to datacenters, OEMs, AI companies, etc. They are just shutting down the retail facing side of things, and going exclusively for B2B, because they think that's where the big money is. They will keep a small team to service warranties. The Crucial name may be going away (for now), but Micron as a memory manufacturer is pivoting their business.
 
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