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The RAM crisis and the PC apocalypse

F. King Daniel

F. King Daniel

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Sooooo... Sam Altman bought 40% of the world's produce of RAM last October, in a contract supposedly extending to 2029 at the earliest. This has driven up RAM prices to an insane degree. It's supposedly for AI data centres that have yet to be built, but some suggest it's the billionaire class unilaterally deciding that PCs are no longer for the poors and everyone has to switch to subscription-based cloud computing. The serfs own nothing.

SSD HD prices are going to skyrocket next supposedly.

I was going to buy a new gaming PC last October, but decided to delay for a year. Big, big regrets, obviously.

Gaming-wise the Steam Machine is presumably delayed indefinitely. Nintendo has lost $20 billion due to increased manufacturing costs for Switch 2. Lord knows what's happening elsewhere. A next-generation of consoles is essentially impossible at present.

CBA to cite anything, admittedly some is random speculation from Twitter, just too pissed off right now.

Rant over.
 
I'm glad I got my PC a year ago. I looked at the parts, and found that it would cost me at least $1000 for the components. I do wonder what the prices of some RAM would be if I wanted 4x64Gb sticks sometime next year. Probably would be $2000 and that isn't worth it for me, so I can stick with the 128gb that I have. I feel sorry for anyone thinking of getting a new computer now.
 
Tosk said:
The sooner some of these Ai fuckos start losing massive amounts of money the better.
Click to expand...

They already are.

Open AI needs to become the most successful company in the history of mankind by the end of the decade or it will run out of money.

However the entire AI framework is a scam like the Housing crisis and the people losing the money are simply rewriting the rules as they go but like the banks found out - eventually your house of cards will fall.
 
Rincewiend said:
Depends on if you want the latest or not...
Though DDR4 ram prices will go up as well as a result...
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DDR4 prices have gone up but not to the same extent as DDR5 (the 128GB DDR5 I bought last Feb cost me $CA450 but would now cost close to $CA1500).

There was still some production on the older ram, but the demand for the newer stuff saw it killed off completely.

Any DDR4 that was left in the retail channels went up in price and then there was none which lead to an increase in the second hand market.
 
Yep, this is going to suck, also, OEM's will get the left over production capacity, HP, Dell etc so that puts even more pressure on the available RAM, just did a sneak peak, I bough at 2x8GB DDR4 kit for an APU system, it was last September and the price was 47.99 Euro, same kit now is 133,85 Euro so yeah, that is more than twice the price.
Same with SSD's a simple Kingston A400 480Gb drive is now 81 euro, in October I bought one for 31 Euro..
A quick look at DDR 5 cheapest 2x8GB kit I can find at my usual shop us 290.90 Euro..
So if you need a new PC then a pre-built like a Dell, HP, Lenovo, Medion etc is the way to go, might be still overpriced but nowhere near the price you'd pay for a machine you build yourself at a similar spec.. :shifty:
 
Good news is that built out my ASUS miniPC last year with crucial parts in January, and I upgraded the RAM in my current laptop last January too. Back then, I was able to get 32GB of RAM for $81.

I had planned to build a new PC this year. Obviously, that plan has been delayed.

Instead, I'm upgrading my cabling and adding a 10TB CMR drive to my NAS that will replace an existing 4TB drive. Fortunately, I was able to get a good deal last month on a hard drive even though everything else went up.
 
It's been a rough few years for PC gamers and we can't seem to catch a break. First was the Crypto trend driving up scarcity and prices of processors, not to mention the flood at the big circuit manufacturer in Japan, and prices did stabilize for a while, and now we have this situation with the RAM. I got my new PC two years ago and that time I was in desperate need for a new one and it had become not just a need but a necessity, and when I mean desperate, I mean that I was running into bottlenecks almost constantly with my old 2015-era PC, and it was time, so I had to bite the bullet. And while I'm glad I did, I'd hate to be in a similar situation now.
 
Owain Taggart said:
It's been a rough few years for PC gamers and we can't seem to catch a break. First was the Crypto trend driving up scarcity and prices of processors, not to mention the flood at the big circuit manufacturer in Japan, and prices did stabilize for a while, and now we have this situation with the RAM. I got my new PC two years ago and that time I was in desperate need for a new one and it had become not just a need but a necessity, and when I mean desperate, I mean that I was running into bottlenecks almost constantly with my old 2015-era PC, and it was time, so I had to bite the bullet. And while I'm glad I did, I'd hate to be in a similar situation now.
Click to expand...
If you want a PC for routine stuff, you can't go wrong with a miniPC. I use one for my router. You can't use one for serious gaming, but you can still game on it as integrated graphic processors have improved a ton.
 
bdub76 said:
If you want a PC for routine stuff, you can't go wrong with a miniPC. I use one for my router. You can't use one for serious gaming, but you can still game on it as integrated graphic processors have improved a ton.
Click to expand...

As a baseline, yeah, that's good. And I'll say the baseline we have now is much faster than that from 15 years ago, and I say that as someone who's struggled with a slow computer for the past 10 years or so not able to do much gaming on one up until two years ago. The faster RAM and processor helps a ton along with the threading. Threading is underrated and it was a revelation to me when I got my new PC.
 
I got a new laptop for myself last year, I usually get a gaming laptop for the graphics card and RAM. So glad I didn't wait, It'd probably be hundreds more for basically the same equipment.
 
Forgot to add GPU's to the list of important. Those are being throttled and price jumped too.

So if your current computer has or is near to kick the bucket, i'd recomend buying sooner than latter.

My current is a 10+ year old HP, still a kicking but I got a Mini PC a month ago to just make sure if it does go tits up, I have a back up.
 
You can also find refurbished machines, I've bought two Dell 3060 Mini's a few days ago and they're like new, they were 149 Euro's per machine, these are basic office machines but they've got an i3 8100T, 8 GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD, they've got really good connectivity for the size, been eyeballing a few refurb sites here and you can get decent last gen machines for pretty nice money..
Also, a not too old office machine can be spruced up a little, get a gfx card that's not drawing crazy juice and you can even turn a HP or Dell office slave into a passable all round machine with okay gaming performance just to get by.
Also AM4 APU machines with a 5600G 6 core/12 thread machines are coming onto the second hand market, those have pretty decent performance if you play older games.
 
18 months ago i build a new PC:
AMD Ryzen 9 5900x 3.7GHZ 12 Core Processor and a Asus DUAL OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card...
Going full on M.2 SSD, 1 500GB for windows and a 4TB for the games, 64 GB DDR4 ram...
Was around €2000, now, with apropiate replacements like DDR5 ram it would be way more...
 
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