Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.
Ffs I keep delaying a rebuild of my PC because of crap like this every year thinking the bubble will burst, but something new comes up. I don’t use it for gaming nowadays, just regular browsing since I have a console but even Sony is bringing their stuff to PC so I was looking to upgrade. Now it’s been pushed even more.
Hang in there my 8 GB ram PC with GTX 960…
so i switched myself and my parents to arch linux over the past 3-4 months and I can say definitively that those specs are fine for CachyOS (an Arch Linux distro). My mom is using my hand-me-down 970 with its lovely “we charged you for 4gb of vram but actually only 3.5 of it is fast haha sucker” and it runs great paired to an old i7 6700k.
If you got good internet you could look into GeForce Now as a stopgap / headstart.
If you have 8gb ddr4 you can probably get a decent deal on a used 8gig stick. Even that would be quite aboost.
I just received all the parts for the high end gaming PC I’m building for my son for xmas. And I’ll have some uses for it too.
I didn’t really feel like I could delay it arbitrarily because teaching him real computer stuff (including games because I’m a fun dad) matters a lot more to me than however many hundreds of dollars I might have eventually saved.
And man it HURT. The RAM isn’t anywhere near the most expensive part, but it somehow stings the most. I like to err on the high side with memory and have never regretted it. But, this 2025 build is going to have the same 32GB memory size as my 2018 build did, and the prices for the kits was very similar for both purchases.
I’m tempted to splurge and swap for a 64GB kit before I start building, but it might be cheaper and easier to just wait a year. Or honestly never. The added memory would probably only help with my video editing, and that’s not a big part of my computer usage.