I am infinitely grateful to my past self that I purchased an on-sale 64GB RAM upgrade for my Framework 13 in 2024 before prices skyrocketed. It was $119, and checking back right now… Holy crap the same thing is $1,079 now.
Yeah, I put 96GB of DDR4 in a PC just before prices went wild and my only regret is that I didn’t also do my server. Garage sales have been interesting this summer. Always hoping to find old PCs or TiVo devices so I can grab the hard drives and/or ram.
I got some 16gb of DDR4 i found in a closet. You guys can start bidding.
i’m using an optiplex sff with 32gb ddr4 as a monitor stand right now. i just don’t know what the hell to do with it… so it sits, probably until the dietpi running on a jaguar soc keels over.
What I’d do is a little media center / HTPC so my TVs stay dumb.
already have a media ‘server’ and several things to watch ‘tv’ on or from.
this is what we were doing with it… trying out winpodx, but it’s not quite ‘usable’ like this (updated after this, does same). so it (and it’s hp cousin with similar specs) sit waiting for their next call-to-arms.
I fucking had to keep pushing back buying some more RAM. Yeah, that was a great move. Now I can only hope the bubble bursts and prices crash.
I mean, I get by fine with the RAM I have. I don’t need much. It’s the principle of the thing, you know? Sometimes being financially responsible and careful sucks.
The thing with the bubble bursting is it will still take time for it to come down, as they’ll need to start manufacturering consumer RAM again. The stuff they’re churning out now can’t be thrown into a PC or laptop.
And they’ll NEVER allow prices to drop back to reasonable levels. They’ve already learned people will pay a premium during a shortage, so they can still artificially control the supply to keep prices high.
If competitors ever emerge making RAM at reasonable prices, we need to boycott the current fuckwads even when they undercut the new players.
I dont… I am absolutely stressing the DDR3 I have. But no way I am going to pay 500% for some memory!
It seems the more this shit happens the less I need tech in my life (pulls notebook out of back pocket and writes this down for posterity).
I wonder if the fed gov cares that entire sectors of the tech economy are being threatened by one (AI).
They might get interested if people start talking about Epstein again.
I could have bought a 16 GB DDR4 stick at 30, now they go for 150, I’m going to be stuck at 24 GB forever now.
On the plus side, all the game companies are going to finally start optimizing games and quit pushing out more and more demanding shit. A big win for smaller devs and creative\fun game developers too. My steam deck and old PC gonna keep on winning.
What do you expect? Few will be able to afford to play their whizbang-5000 games. We already saw it play out with VR.
You might be right. But charging them $15 a month to stream their whizbang-5000 games is still an option. Especially for Microsoft and Sony. (And Amazon wants in on that too.)
Dingaling! They will rent it to you and it will have latency issues, but who cares money.
I will say technologically my trials of both Google Stadia and Xbox Live Play Anywhere were both impressive and ran well for single player and co-op games. But the idea of actually paying an ongoing fee to play my games? Fuck that.
People said this about movies too, don’t be too optimistic
Yeah, perhaps they’ll start bundling network play time with the game and we won’t have a choice aside from playing our existing games.
I feel so justified for doubling down on Zen 3, and replacing my dead R9 5900X with an R9 5900XT lol
I’m getting worried, 'cause I’ve got the same. What killed yours?
Bad luck. I started getting random reboots, the reboots started happening more and more frequently. I tried a few kits of spare RAM I had laying around, reboots kept happening. I replaced the PSU with a brand new one because mine was a decade old, reboots persisted. I replaced the CPU on a whim (with an upgrade if it was fine), problem went away entirely, not a single reboot since.
That’s strange - I had some of the same symptoms and it ended up being a completely different thing - a dying (and then eventually completely dead) SSD (the Phison controller fiasco).
Other than that the CPU itself seems fine and it’s only shown very minor degradation over the 4-5 years I’ve had it - i.e. it used to boost up to 4975 or 4950 single core, now it only goes up to about 4900 (no PBO, no CO); and I’ve also had to fix the SoC voltage because of the memory - but I haven’t touched that in like 3 years, so not sure it’s even degradation.
Yeah I tried increasing voltage, decreasing voltage, resetting BIOS to default settings, etc. I tried everything you could think of but nothing helped.
I did see a post on reddit from someone else with the same MCE hardware errors in Linux that I was getting, with the same random rebooting, and their 5900X ended up dying too.
If my workstation goes up in value in 4 years, something is seriously going.
Another 500% and I’ll be recording my ram along with my other retirement assets.
The only rational choice right now is to wait to buy new ram.
Either production capacity catches up and this amount of silicon is the new normal and prices come down or the ai bubble does crash and prices come down.
It can’t go on at this price point forever.
It can there are only 3 producers and they can decide to not let the price drop
Except in my lifetime I’ve seen the prices of computer components swing wildly based on supply and demand.
Tech improvements tend to drive prices down not up, it’s less about supplier collusion in this particular market.
Maybe this time is different but I’m not betting on this.
Every DRAM manufacturer has pled guilty to price fixing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
If we still have governments holding them accountable, then it will go down. If we don’t, it won’t
Well this is interesting. I guess it will at least take some time for governmental change then. Doesn’t mean it can’t change though. Not saying it’s easy.
You’re acting like they are like they were less than 10 years ago. They aren’t. They think they won the game and are just consolidating.
This has been said before. Like I said maybe this time is different, but I’m not betting on it.
There has been consolidation among a few manufacturers for a long time. The silicon part isn’t the most expensive it’s the chip designs. If the prices say high we should see new startups emerge with new approaches and cheaper silicon. China is already making progress here, and nothing I’m seeing is telling me this time would be different from us chip designers. Also Europe is looking to get some us resilience and startups in chip design could happen there too.
It’s convenient to blame greed, and in some industries this is very relevant, but silicon is so much less defensible at least in the chip design industry that startups are likely to keep on coming as long as opportunity exists, which high prices are a pretty good indicator of high demand and limited supply.
I have worked in this industry for a long time, I’ve seen the cycles, and again I expect this time to cycle again.
I hope you are correct. I really do. But my fear is that they see how dependent we have become on this and what a tool of control it can be and simply make it illegal or otherwise very difficult for other start ups to get started.
Oh I don’t doubt that the current market leaders would love to price fix and play monopoly, that’s the desired end goal of all businesses.
The question is how hard is it for a startup or competitive country to get in and compete on price. I’m watching China’s chip fab especially for this reason, they have an economy that can take massive losses on something even at this scale to lock in new customers with cheap Chinese RAM. They’ve done this in many other industries I fully expect they will be competitive in this one too, and that’s just ONE credible threat to monopolies.
The us government going back to a rule of law government could also help enforce changes and break up monopoly, we will see if and how long that will take.
yea its getting pretty bad. i bought 32gb 3200mhz ddr4 ram like 3 years ago for like 50 dollars brand new on amazon, and i recently had to purchase that same amount for a server pc im building and it costed like $130 USED
Ah you crazy kids, we used to have to lock our computers in steel cases in the early 2000s.
Bought my first prebuilt 2 years ago and it’s now worth over twice what I spent on it. First time in my life I remember anything like that happening.
So I got this RAM in August 2025, for ~$400 according to the receipt:
…That is absolutely bonkers.
I ebay’ed my DDR5 RDIMM 5600 RAM sticks. 32gb was $606 some months ago, the remaining six sticks was about $3,600 bucks. I was originally planning on waiting for bubbles to burst and DDR6 to be released before switching to a DDR5 platform, but the whole war with Iran threw everything into doubt.
The US’s strategic oil reserve will likely run out within half a year, which means everything costing more. I wanted to be smart with my money and wait for a good time to buy, but this situation has ruined my planning. I bit the bullet and used a flex-pay to let me buy now.
Is it that my discipline sucks, or is the world certain to go into a hellish handbasket? I cannot tell anymore…
I honestly don’t know. Even setting Iran aside, it’s impossible to tell when the bubble will deflate, and even then, when memory supply will somewhat normalize.
But if you can afford it, it seems like a reasonable decision to me. Iran and the US could become allies tommorow, but DDR5 still isn’t coming down soon, and you get to use your server now instead of having to wait forever.
I got 64GB of ram for my laptop back in April, was close to 700, of is 829 today. I guess only desktop sizes are over 1k?
Like April this year?
Could be that it was DDR4 or something.
Ddr5, but the laptop size on amazon. I just checked and its still under 900
Well, 900 for 64GB is still outrageous, unfortunately.
Yes, yes it is 😓
And people who have an issue with this are called luddites
Absolute clown show
We’ve been told historical lies. People who have an issue with this are like Luddites, but that’s because the Luddites were justified too!
They weren’t against technology; they were against it being used to abuse and exploit them as workers.
I’ve only heard that term being used to insult, that’s actually a real thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who protested the usage of certain types of automated machinery owing to their concerns relating to worker pay, labour savings, child labour, working conditions, and output quality. They often destroyed said machines in organised raids. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of “Ned Ludd”, a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
History is written by the victors, and the luddites lost. That’s why they’re maligned as backwards idiots who didn’t want tech to succeed.
They weren’t stupid. They knew precisely what was going to happen, and did their best to stop it. Generally they took care to target only machines as their goal wasn’t to harm people but to remain employed, and have money to survive with. Naturally there were exceptions, and sometimes people did get hurt.
But then, the bourgeoisie enacted law to prevent this where destroying mechanical looms became punishable by… oh let’s see…
The act, as passed, made the destruction of mechanised looms […] a capital felony (and hence a crime punishable by death).
Right! Death! Destruction of company property became punishable by death.
And people did die. Children died. Mind you, back then workers were anyone capable of working, and they had no rights. They didn’t vote for the people who passed this act; workers weren’t supposed to have a voice, and so the only recourse was rebellion.
This didn’t stop things immediately, there’s quite a lot of really cool worker history here, but eventually the government sent in the military and couple that with nothing really changing despite widespread rebellion, the luddite movement fizzled out.
This is why I am opposed to the death penalty and I want the police disarmed. It is also why I still believe in workers arming themselves.
I’ve never heard it used as an insult. How is it even supposed to be offensive? “Har har you’re a person who doesn’t like tech”?
Less of “you’re a person who doesn’t like tech” and more “you’re not with the times/are scared of the future”… which is pretty close to some messaging from clankers.
I am scared of the future, you know why? Because everything feels so unbearably bleak and I wish I had something to feel actually hopeful for.
But I guess we’ll own nothing and be forced to live with it.
I see, thank you!
Gotta warp the truth to misdirect from the real problems.
They confuse us with legitimate technophobes.
My stepmother was a technophobe. She read articles about school shootings in the US, and thought if I got addicted to video games like Quake, I’ll be buying a machine gun from the black market, then end up as a murderer. Yes, she also had a moral panic about drug use, all while she was a borderline alcoholic. The farce in it was that while I wasn’t allowed to play any Quake games, there was no harm in Unreal games, which arguably are better. The tragedy in it was that she tried her best to steer me away from computers, giving me some disadvantage in college, also she lied to the doctors about my first seizure to make it seem like it was due to the computer, which lead to the doctors not doing tests besides EEG and strobe lights. Once social media rolled out, she somewhat changed her mind on the subject, though she was still ignorant enough to think “software developer” and “CNC programmer” are the same, and almost got me a job at a local factory (she feared that if I lived on Budapest for a bit longer, I’d get some lung disease, because big city equals bad air).
Quake isn’t as good as Unreal? Blasphemy!
Kid me had a lot of fun in those games.
Let me guess, she’s an avid social media user nowadays?
She’s dead, and I don’t know how to feel about it, especially as she abused my brother even harder than me.
They say you should only speak good about the dead.
She’s dead. Good.
Yeah apparently you’d think there be some closure or something but it seems that’s not how it works. Keep in there, and try to forget about the whole ordeal, that’s what I’m trying anyways, living with my demons. Works. Cheers.
