Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 415 posts

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#261

Post by burnt-resistor »

Hamuko wrote: post #50
whizzter wrote: post #35

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

My bet is that we're not gonna see any adjustments in RAM pricing until one of the planned data center projects collapses in a spectacular way.

The billionaires locked in a race to spend effectively unlimited funds on AI CapEx will have to be convinced by markets and/or their advisers that there aren't enough profits and that cutting losses (like with Metaverse) in their quixotic quest is necessary.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#262

Post by jmyeet »

I bought a prebuilt mid-2025: 32GB DDR5-6000, 2TB SSD, 9800X3D, 5070 Ti for $1900. This happened to be good timing but you can still get these specs for a similar price occasionally eg [1] was $1899 last week. Luckily for me I bought a DDR5-6000 64GB kit for $200 for no real reason. And yeah that same kit is almost $1000 today. Plus I still have the old 32GB kit.

If you're building your own PC, your best bet is to buy a bundle. If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Micro Center (they don't deliver), then you have good options [2]. Newegg does too.

Prebuilts get a bad rep and it's not really justified. That Walmart PC is ABS. That's Newegg, basically. I'm sorry but you just can't buy that parts list for $!900. The idea that there is a $1000 premium for a prebuilt is just not true. Alos, I hear people say "it only takes an hour to build a PC". No, it doesn't. Maybe if you've built 20 PCs it does but if you don't do it regularly, it's a massive pain. Years ago I used to do this. I'm too old and the novelty has worn off. I don't want to diagnose if I've gotten my motherboard headers right or why my fans aren't spinning up or why my PC isn't POSTing or even just getting the cabling right, etc etc etc.

But yes, if you're just buying RAM by itself the situation is horrific. If you can live with a 32GB gaming PC, there are options that are relatively comparable to what you could get a year ago. If you want 64GB+ of RAM, that's going to bite.

[1]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/ABS-Eurus-Ruby-Gaming-PC-Windows-...

[2]: https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/bundle-and-save.asp...

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#263

Post by tosti »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #189
ChiperSoft wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I did a price check on the PC I built two years ago. It went from $2300 to $3650. The bulk of that increase was that the ram went from $210 to $940. Its now more expensive than when DDR5 was new.

Those are rookie numbers https://stocks.sjer.red/

Well boo-hoo. It's about time more people got to know what it's like not to be on the bleeding edge. I've always had second-hand computers and only once bought myself a new laptop, the asus EeePC after the price dropped.

Ten years from now I'll get to watch inception in 4K.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#264

Post by gib444 »

mathgeek wrote: post #171
nickjj wrote: post #165

I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price. Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours. All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifyin…

> I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price. Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.

A Steam Deck is as vital as food or fuel...?

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#265

Post by throwway120385 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #131
gvalkov wrote: post #99

The squeeze is real even at the SME level. We recently wanted to add another TB of memory to several servers (we do EDA chip design, which eats a lot of memory). Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs. Mind you, this is for refurbished memory with 1 year warranty. I'm still figuring out if this is FU-pricing or just how things are going to be from now on. Spec-ing and buying servers has become…

I still believe that Mark Zuckerberg would have been smarter investing all his AI funding into just making RAM fabs. Would probably have printed easy cash. Instead he's burning cash on making IG / FB less secure because of his in-house AI.

Mine the miners.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#266

Post by keyringlight »

nerdjon wrote: post #87

I am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot. I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now. The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are grow…

The way of observing it I find concerning is if you look at PC gaming (or personal computing in general) as a population, with a rate of new entrants or 'birth rate' and people exiting or 'death rate'. It's hard to be optimistic with raising barriers to entry, upgrading or replacing failed hardware which seems like it'd shrink that population over the long term, and make it less attractive to invest in. This isn't even new with the influence of AI, crypto mining was similar but in retrospect just a taster course.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#267

Post by linguae »

liendolucas wrote: post #214

Is it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM? Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments? For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of a…

I doubt that most computer users have more than 16GB of RAM in their systems. There are plenty of users on 8GB systems and some still on 4GB. Even when considering bloated Web apps, 8GB of RAM is passable and 16GB is plenty.

I think people who need more than 16GB of RAM are power users with higher memory requirements, such as those using local LLMs, those who frequently use virtualization, and people doing tasks such as video editing.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#268

Post by jacobgkau »

liendolucas wrote: post #214

Is it just me or do I have the feeling that we have gone too far with our memory requirements? Why everyone now suddenly need 32Gb, 64Gb or hundreds of additional Gb of RAM? Same thing with GPUs, is kind of insane having so much processing power and yet requiring more and more. What purpose for? What's the limit? Does it really really pay off such investments? For me as a non-AI developer (I don't use any models of a…

Use cases besides software development exist. Even relatively simple video editing can easily run past 16GB, and so can photo editing if you're working with more than a few high-resolution images at once. On the consumer side, YouTube in any Chromium-based browser with an ad blocker runs its memory usage up to 5GB+ if the tab's open too long. Add a couple of these use cases together, and you just need more RAM.

Re: 32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

#269

Post by Silhouette »

simonsarris wrote: post #167
pjc50 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply is both already constrained and AI companies have pre-purchased enough HBM at enough of a premium that most of the wafers are allocated to them. All the intermediaries are jacking up their prices so their inventory doesn't empty too quickly, because they may not be able to refill it. It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved…

> It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. I get what you're saying but medium term this is an extremely funny sentiment. This money being poured is likely to end up being a huge boon for a lot of economic sectors, including in the US. Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut, with a medium term win for consumers, even if we have 1-2 (more)…

The problem is that the medium term prospects are irrelevant to all the businesses that won't be around long enough to enjoy them.

Smaller businesses in particular - not so long past the COVID disruption and already facing significant challenges in areas like logistics and energy supply costs - will not necessarily have the reserves that older and larger businesses often do to withstand another multi-year price shock.

Post reply on HN