- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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32GB for 375 seems pretty reasonable to me…32GB seems like an ass ton for enthusiasts.
I used to plan for about $2/GB of RAM. So 64 GB used to call about $130.
Now it’s about $12/GB of RAM, which means the cost of ram has multiplied 6-fold.
Are you kidding me? This time last year you could buy 32GB of DDR5 for under $100
I paid $160 for the same last September.
I paid less than that for a very good 64GB less than 2 years ago.
1gb of ram costs more than 1 hour of minimum wage
RAM has always gone through huge price cycles as long as I can remember. You buy when it is good value then don’t when it goes up. The industry always responded to high prices by building too much capacity so after a few years the prices all crashed.
This time it feels different. We don’t have the huge diversity of producers we once did. The 3 big remaining players clearly operate as something like a cartel. I doubt they are responding to current shortages with huge new fab investments.
Lots of PC part manufacturers and retailers aren’t going to make it through to the over side of this. I think it could lead to massive long term changes for the DIY market.
At least China is pushing to expand production capacity.
HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.
Much more than doubled. Most high-TB drives are not in stock anywhere, and even if you find a drive, the best deals are around $26-28/TB for used drives, whereas before new deals would be $10/TB. If you’re looking for a specific new capacity, you may be paying $36-40/TB.
It’s interesting, that’s what I felt was happening, but when I looked at the charts, it seems they are less than double. Either way it feels really expensive.
I think it depends on the drive sizes, whether you accept used, and if we’re comparing bare to shuckable, but yeah, for drives that I am looking for in the 20-26TB range (new, since I don’t have enough parity/redundancy to trust used drives), it seems more like 2.5-4x cost.
I’ve been putting 12tb used SAS drives in my Plex server. The used market went up about 30% from last year for the same drives. I think I paid $115 each before, now they’re $150.
I don’t doubt you found a deal somewhere, but here’s what I’m seeing:
That’s admittedly better than $26/TB, but I also had been looking at 20-24TB drives. That’s the other change - the lowest-$/TB (highest value) TB size is has decreased substantially (from around 20-24 in late 2025, to 10-12 now).
I bought 5 of these last September at $99 each https://ebay.us/m/x9d0kn. When I did some searching about a month ago, I found a couple for around $150 of the same model. So I paid less initially than I thought.
Building a computer like 5 years from now will be a weird experience because you will buy most parts from brands that you have never heard of. Very few of the manufacturers we know today will still be around by that time.
They will have Chinese RAM by then, so yeah, its going to be the random made up Amazon/Temu Chinese brands.
AmzRamBar24
Which is the same thing as the GOODKINDSTICK that everyone says is really good, but only if you get the V3.65 from 2025, the new stuff is garbage.
And you have to be careful because their versioning is broken. Version 5 is older than 3.
The Xbox 1 says hi
Yes, this is Microsoft. They have some issues with counting.
Who puts an HDD into a desktop computer in 2026? For a NAS I would understand, but putting an HDD in a desktop is very uncommon nowadays, even as a secondary drive
I didn’t say desktop. But, in any case, there are plenty of reasons someone might want extra storage in their desktop without shelling out for an SSD.
I guess I’ll just stay on am4 until the bubble pops then. DDR4 has also gone up, but at least the prices are reasonable
Not really, DDR4 has gone up 3-4x the price as well.
What? Seems to be a thing in your region, cos here in germany prices have “only” risen by factor 2 to 3 at most. Just looked at prices on Amazon for 2x8GB DDR4 ram, the cheapest goes for around 150 Euros. Before, it was 70 Euros.
I bought 2x16GB DDR4 for 60€ new in Germany, that was summer 2024. The same kit is now around 225€.
Used 8gb sticks are cheap on second hand markets, just get a motherboard with shitload of sots
I long for the day when we get to put up human chandeliers.
Basically we will be buying computer parts in specific decades, like this decade is bad for anything memory, last was bad for anything GPU. Next will be bad for, I don’t know, screens or mobos. And so on.
Next decade you’ll be running Linux on Windows Portal hacked to run Linux instead of a dumbed down Windows to rent PC from Azure.
I’m looking for 64 GB (4x16) DDR4-2400 SODIMM. It is going to run me like 350 bucks… For used modules.
Absolutely ridiculous.
I’d go for 2x32 if you can. I’ve heard of people having more issues with 4 dimms than 2 when you get above 32GB
Computer is an old Lenovo P71. Had 4 slots with a maximum of 16GB per slot.
Ahhh, I got ya. Well just be prepared to run it at 2133mt/s, if you have any instability.
It weighs like 9lbs. Literally the most stable and planted laptop I’ve had since 3rd grade.
I should see what Ii have laying around.
Don’t worry, China is about to flood the market. Don’t buy RAM yet, wait for the prices to normalize first.
Any day now ™
Don’t be too hopeful. China will first fill their demand
Definitely, but they also won’t miss the opportunity to become a major actor in the industry globally. Contrary to the US, they have in the past decade made a lot of moves to establish their influence globally.
Which will impact the demand world-wide, because China’s demand also takes from that either way.
What if they decide to just keep their rare earth metals for themselves and control the entire market?
They already announced they are mass producing RAM and are going to export. So the market is going to be flooded.
I’m saying they could corner the market on components they can manufacture by banning export of the raw resources they control. Threatening rare earth metal exports was how they got Trump to heel.
that’d be based
Sinking the market for all the hardware hoarders is a good counter too. I’m fairly convinced that this move isn’t just about AI, but consolidation of resources into Cloud services that lets them squeeze out competitors and force consumers and businesses alike into a perpetual-rent model. AI is just a convenient way to allocate the money to corner the market
My CostCo is selling a gaming PC for $1,300, with 64gb of DDR5 and a RTX 5060. If that is a decent deal, go pick one up before the oil shocks start to really hit.
Depends on other things as well. It could be a decent deal but a pre built PC rarely is, even pre covid.
I always go for a custom build myself. Got a Thor NAS chassis, I am just waiting for de-dollarization and the AI bubble to pop, so that I can use my Euros to build a top-shelf PC. Debating whether to pick up the motherboard now, since that is more unique component that can potentially stop being available. A Threadripper CPU and the RAM would be more generic.
Honestly I might go for that Costco deal just for the RAM.
it’s going to be have like the slowest frequency a DDR5 can have but at current prices, getting your hands on one is already good enough.
I like to go to the nearby shop and pay the guy to put one together for me. I don’t know nearly enough to keep up with the industry, so I’ll defer to expertise.
Upgraded my homelab with 256GB right before the prices went nuts. Lucky me.
But before I bought the best GPU at the time for absolute peak-price, adamant it would rise further and never going back.
So…universe equalized for me. For now.
I just had to buy a m.2 drive. It cost more than double the same item I bought in 2022. It also cost more than the entire computer it’s being installed into! FML.
Yep. A few months ago the 1TB “King fast” m.2 that came in a $150 refurb tinyQ died. Replacement drive was… I want to say $160? (Locally, needed it ASAP)
I should’ve opened the case up when I got the PC and noticed the obvious knock off/garbage SSD but I can’t honestly say I’m surprised.
this sucks because I can function at 16 now but I have to juggle things more and I know I use less than the typical power user. I could survive at at 8 but it will be a massive pain.
So speaking of which, is there a way to clean out a C drive on a computer? I have a fairly new one I have barely used and somehow the C drive is full.
Idk the GBs but I suspect some kind of fuckery is involved.
Have you tried turning it upside down and shaking out the loose files?
I use Filelight on Linux and it looks like it’s on win11 as well - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pfxcd722m2c
I would have recommended WinDirStat myself. I never did like the pie chart style views in programs like Filelight and Baobab.
(I use Graphical Disk Map on Linux. Not quite as full featured as WinDirStat but works in a pinch.)
Check out QDirStat
Oh. Well that’s much better.
I don’t remember seeing it in my distro’s package manager previously, but I have a feeling I might have rejected it for being a Qt app. By default their look and feel doesn’t match my window manager choices, and my distro hasn’t ever handled that automatically, so I may have decided I didn’t like the look of it.
Now I’m aware of qt5ct (changes some of the look and feel of Qt5 apps) so that’s not as much of a problem any more.
Adding another suggestion for WinDirStat in a direct reply to you, in case you didn’t notice the reply to the reply. It makes finding the biggest diskspace hogs trivial, whether it’s a massive file sitting deep in the directory tree or a directory full of other directories that each have 500 3MB files that all add up to 100GB, or 3 installers’ temporary files that they never cleaned up, though you’ll only notice them if they take up a lot of space.
Going back to the 90s when a few megabytes was hundreds of dollars.
We added 4 megs to our 486 and it was $80 a meg so $320 for the upgrade. That was back when hard drives where a little over a dollar per meg.
Are you sure about hard drives at $1 per meg at that time?
It sounds way to cheap.Yes, you are probably right. I think I am thinking of when I built my Pentium 100 and it was $360 for a 360 meg hard drive.
Or 80s, where it was kilobytes.
That’d be great if software still had the same small footprint it had back then.
I quite like the idea of people just not engaging with this.
Can’t play the latest AAA because I can’t afford the equipment for it? No worries, there’s literally thousands of other games out there.
More realistically though, people will end up subbing to a streaming service, which is almost certainly what the companies would prefer.
Piracy and giving them nothing is the answer
RETURN TO THE OLD WAYS
This.
You can’t pirate ram though
zswap enters the chat
Though in fairness, it is free.
Oh, have I got news for you…
WAY AHEAD OF YOU MATEY
That’s what I do for new games now, fuck $100 for a linear single player game. I implore all studios to use Denuvo as it’s the best DRM on the market 😉
This isn’t necessarily about games.
My mini PC only has 4GB of RAM because I thought I’d just buy it later, and “for now” if it just boots it’s fine.Stop Killing Games could play neatly into this, fingers crossed.
If you’ve got a PC built in the last few years you can play them anyway.
Mostly this affects people whose PCs are pretty old already :/ but like if you’ve got an AM4 build you can just upgrade your GPU and maybe CPU if necessary and keep your good ol’ DDR4. AM4 truly the GOAT of CPU sockets in terms of longevity.
This is so true.
My PC I built has parts from as far as 12 yrs ago and day to day tasks go very smoothly especially since I switched to Linux. I haven’t bought a newly released game from a big publisher since Borderlands 3 and that ran fine. Most recent indie games still run well too.
I’m currently planning on upgrading with used parts from 2020 ish not because I need to, but because I’d like to play some games from 2010-2020 in medium-to-high graphic settings and hopefully make it last another decade.
Chasing AAA highest setting has always been an expensive hobby, but not it’s straight up luxury that only those with a lot of disposable income or make a living off gaming can afford. And honestly that’s fine because there are just so many good games out there that don’t require the specs.
or maybe, just maybe… You could, are you ready for this idea…?
Play on medium settings !!!GASP!!! Or worse, play it at 1080!
1080 and 1440 is a pretty big difference. 1440 and 4k, not so much. Definitely agree that there’s a point with settings where you just don’t really notice the textires/reflections/etc. when you’re playing the game.
Idiot me bought a 4k laptop and be fucked if I’m not gonna use every single pixel on that screen (even if I can’t tell a difference between 1440 and 4k)
I mean if you’ve you hardware that needs upgrading, you aren’t playing new games at medium anymore either and your display is probably 1080p anyway.
I have a 16gb rx6800… playing stardew valley lol
I’m mostly just concerned on what I’ll do if a piece of hardware dies or corrupts at this point.
