I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
How about just don’t buy a PC for now? I’m sure the machine you’ve got in good enough. Just hang on to it until the prices come back down
My old i7 4790k with DDR3 can run for a little longer…
Yeah, it sucks though. It feels like building a PC has been inadvisable more often than not. Thanks to the GPU prices being ridiculous a while back. Now this. It’s crazy that you have to time building a PC between these stupid waves.
How much RAM does a time machine require because that seems to be the basic advice here.
DDR6 will be about to release by the time RAM prices return to normal…
Best advice is grab an AM4 motherboard and go for DD4 ram. You wont notice a difference in performance for majority of games. DDR4 ram and AM4 cpu’s are cheap.
No. Ddr4 ram prices have been tripling this year.
I needed ddr4 ecc, but couldnt justify paying 3x the price that I paid last year.
Also wanted to buy ddr4 sodimm for my wife’s laptop, you guessed it, 3x the price.
Way too late
Dont wait too long, retailers are catching on and increasing prices.
2nd hand its still cheap
DDR4 RAM is presently cheaper than DDR5, but it has also increased dramatically in price recently.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
DDR4:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ed889201-f9e6-46ec-81a8-832f6bfc63ed.jpeg
DDR5:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/35d03746-8d9c-443f-808f-8c88f2914b73.jpeg
So happy I bought a m.2 for my laptop right before this insanity. Wonder if spinning plates are coming back to the menu?
As soon as I saw the prices of ram shoot up a couple weeks ago I started looking into am4 chips and so did everyone else I guess lol. Now I don’t even see the 5800/5700x3d for sale at all in my local used market.
Yeah but who needs a 5800X3D? a 5500 or 5600x will be fine for most. If you can afford to get a 5800x3d dont worry about the price and just buy it money clearly aint an issue.
Lol what?? 5800X3D was like $250 when I bought mine. I wouldn’t say it was cheap but its defintely not a “money is no issue” kind of number.
Edit: alright rereading your comment, you were probably talking about people who want to buy a 5800X3D right now with today’s price, and not just anyone who was ever in the market for 5800X3D-level CPUs
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Looks like I’m going to be stuck in 2023 for a long long time…
This, but 2015
Clearly the best advice is “Build your PC a year ago”
Not even. More like 3 months ago.
The pair of 2x16 DDR5 6000 TEAMGROUP I bought back in April was $90 from Amazon. According to pcpartpicker, pricing started trending upwards late September, which Newegg still had it at $89 (9/30/25; B&H @ $109). The same pair at B&H is currently $439 (12/21/25) and MemoryC is asking $596. It’s insane.
Ya but video cards have been insane since covid too
Even before covid, when crypto was the big thing
I guess my ageing i5-8400, 16GB, GTX 1060 rig can keep hobbling along a while yet.
Although I was amused to see my Legion Go S actually has a more powerful CPU now.
Did some server maintenance yesterday, including driver updates. Broke my system since it updated my Nvidia driver to 590.x which no longer supports our little 1060s. Had to roll back the driver, thankfully easy. Suppose I better start keeping an eye out for some sort of upgrade…
Amd 9070xt and 9060xt options are probably the best you are going to get for the next 2 years.
Dont buy Nvidia again. They just end of lifed the 10th most popular GPU used with Steam.
Nah, it’s not doing a lot of heavy lifting on my server, it’ll be good for years to come most likely
Get Into books.
Lots of indie and medium size studio games thst run great on hardware from 5 and 10 years ago. AAA gaming is a AAA scam at thr moment. The really quality is in developer owned games.
or play some (a)vn’s.
One of the commenters said:
“avoid building a PC right now” is advice I’ve been following since 2017
And honestly yeah. I guess at this point if you can afford it, just pull the plug whenever, it’s always some bullshit going on the PC Market anyway.
I am running a 2020 ryzen 5950x CPU and a 2080TI I got from a closing down sale of a computer store for $700 in 2019, just before the first Crypto rush.
I dont see myself buying any hardware for performance reasons for the next 3 years. Also not buying new AAA games anymore.
Small studio and indie titles on 50% off steam sales has been my jam of late.
I built my PC in 2019 right at the end of the year and I thank the gods everyday. I’ve only done one CPU upgrade since and it’s still great for 1440p gaming. The whole tower minus monitor and what not was probably like $900 at the time
Same timing for me also. Still plays new games relatively well. Especially considering I have an ultra wide monitor
Don’t consume any AI products. Don’t consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don’t support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.
AI is mainly being aimed at B2B
Why? They are so old! Besides I always liked NSYNC better.
And isn’t delivering there either
So do we expect the cost of gpu’s to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier
Yes GPU prices will rise too.
Top GPUs used to be like 600CAD. Then the covid thing happened and they’ve never come back down.
True! Luckily I’ll always aim below the top of the line.
IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.
They are manufacturing only 35% of consumer ram compared to what they were before? The supply is really going down?
It’s by choice. Samsung did announce recently that they are going back to consumer ram production instead of trying to compete for low margin big contracts on current gen hbm. At half of current prices, ddr5 is more profitable than HBM even for hynix (leader).
They have to have more than enough ram bought up at some point, cant be scaling up infinitely
64GB of DDR3 RAM in a system of that era is straight nuts!
I got a good deal where it was cheaper than the 32gb I intended to have :D It’s DDR4 btw. So it might be worth the whole system soon (1000k for the whole computer in 2017)
Ah, completely forgot that Intel 6th gen introduced DDR4 - I would’ve sworn it was much more recent than that!
You’ve certainly gotten your money’s worth out of your system - that’s for sure!
I went from a 3570K, 16GB, GTX 670 -> GTX 1080 (later SLI’d), to my current rig:
5950X, 32GB, RTX 3090 -> RX 7900 XTX
Just before the Ethereum mining rush took off, and with the current pricing due to AI fuckery - I don’t think I’ll be switching up anytime soon.
Gratz! That seems like you got really good timing to upgrade and then hold on for a bit :)
Yeah, in hindsight it really landed at an opportune time.
It’s a crying shame how greedy companies like Nvidia & Micron have gotten from back-to-back runs on their products - it feel like it will take a generational downturn for them to pull their heads in, and return to the more modest profit margins of the past (which even then was around 30%, IIRC).
That’s actually pretty solid hardware lol get a grip
It still works fine most of the time with a 1080p Monitor :)
I play with less on 2k 120fps
I guess my 96GB of RAM from 3 years ago will still hold up for another decade.
The best we can do is just wait when price will fall down after ai bubble will explode
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
I built a decent PC a couple years ago, and I don’t need to upgrade often since I don’t really care about cutting edge. So I kinda dodged a bullet, but, this sucks.
Honestly the incentive to “upgrade” a gaming PC the past decade is really weak. Aside from a few AAA titles almost all games run just fine on old hardware. Particularly if you ditch Windows.
So let’s just all refuse to buy this overpriced shit. The same price increases have already happened to GPUs and gamers felt like they “needed” to pay those prices still, nah fuck that, don’t give these greedy pigs a dime.
I’m worried that they’re trying to price us into not owning our machines anymore. You will own nothing and rent from us strategy.
What’s stopping someone from not playing ball and just cleaning house on the personal market?
Pricing
Well, good news!
Valve will bring GameBox upon us.
The big unknown that’s been a popular topic of discussion is whether Valve locked in a long-running contract for the hardware before the RAM price increases happened. If they did, then they can probably offer favorable prices, and they’re probably sitting pretty. If not, then they won’t.
My guess is that they didn’t, since:
-
They announced that they would hold off on announcing pricing due to still working on figuring out the hardware cost (which I suspect very likely includes the RAM situation).
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I’d bet that they have a high degree of risk in the number of units that the Steam Machine 2.0 will sell. The Steam Deck was an unexpectedly large success. Steam Machine 1.0 kinda flopped. Steam Machine 2.0 could go down either route. They probably don’t want to contract to have a ton of units built and then have huge oversupply. Even major PC vendors like Dell and Lenovo got blindsided and were unprepared, and I suspect that they’re in a much less-risky position to commit to a given level of sales and doing long-running purchases than Valve is.
I’ve even seen some articles propose that the radical increase in RAM prices might cause Steam Machine 2.0’s release to be postponed, if Valve didn’t have long-running contracts in place and doesn’t think that it can succeed at a higher price point than they anticipated.
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What I see inside the headset after setting the game to 25% Render scale FSR Ultra Performance Lossless Scaling 5x framegen:
Strangely enough even in 2017 the CPU was the Bottleneck for VR with strange micro stuttering in some games. But most played really well (Moss, Walking dead, Half Life Alyx, Holopoint, Beatsaber, Elite Dangerous etc.)
Honestly, a system with 64GB of memory is pretty well-provisioned compared to a typical prebuilt computer system from a major vendor.
I’ve felt that historically, PC vendors have always scrimped too far on RAM. In late 2025 with our RAM shortage, it’d be understandable, but in many prior years, it just looked like a false economy to me. Especially on systems with rotational drives — the OS is going to use any excess RAM for caching, and that’s usually a major performance gain if one has rotational drives sitting around.
EDIT: And battery. At least in 2025, a lot of people are using SSD storage, and caching that in RAM isn’t as huge a win as it is with rotational drives. But lithium batteries have gotten steadily cheaper over the years. The fact that smartphone, tablet, and laptop vendors aren’t jamming a ton of battery in their devices in 2025 is kinda crazy to me.
I intended 32 GB DDR4 2400 but got a Deal for 64 GB DDR 4 2100 for 10 Euro cheaper. The whole system was only 1k to built myself and the only Upgrades I got was a NVME and SSD over the years. I got really lucky to have a Mainboard from that era with an NVME and USBC slot.
But on the other Hand a AM4 Ryzen chipset would have been nice instead of the dark Age Intel Chipset without being able to Upgrade much…
I hear you, you makes sense, but that way lies the death of personal general computing, which would be a crying shame. You’ll have nothing and (won’t) like it a few years later, SaaS taking over powered by all those ‘AI’ datacentres. Peak phone could even have happened if RAM becomes prohibitive, instead they’re just windows on an all centralized, subscription web services. I see it as a pretty existential threat for my preferred way of life.
i built one literally in early November and prices were still normal, that was close haha
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
not necessarily with hardware though. now they are flush with investments and have holes burning in their pockets. everyone is trying to get in on the first stage of AI datacenters.
they may artificially extend the bubble, but rapid hardware expansion/refreshing will be the first thing to slow down or stop when they see it’s not providing value.
The prices will never go down again. There is literally no reason for the companies to decrease the prices. There will be like a 50$ decrease and people would go “oh look it’s so cheap now!!1!!” and companies will keep making 3 times their profits.
Im going to get me a dual CPU thread riper server for $399 when the crash happens!
assuming they will come down, if they can even get people to buy at an inflated price they wont reduce it.
The ai bubble will never pop.
Safeguards have been removed from the market and too many rich people are balls deep. Markets will be manipulated and prices will continue to soar.
nah, it’s a casino. crash will come eventually, the complication is that both bulls and bears want the same thing in the end…higher those lines go up the more $ the people who know how much the underlying is actually worth can cash out.
a crash/correction is just someone cashing out and either not putting the $ back in or atleast actually putting thought behind how they put it back in. the real suckers are the ones buying into everything automatically no matter the price.
Thats how bubbles pop. Those safeguards dont prevent an infinite money glitch, they stop the entire system from crumbling in a mild headwind. People always think this time is different during the growth phase of the bubble.
