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

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

#271
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A few weeks ago I needed a computer to be a Debian server for some at-home simple Web dev / learning stuff. I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G3 SFF PC with i5-6500, 8GB RAM and a 256GB off a popular auction site for £44. It'll do. I might upgrade to 16GB. An additional 8GB stick costs £19.

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

#272

AMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.

So I have some DDR4 RAM that I should probably just sell because I've looked multiple times at building an AM4 PC and it's just not worth it. These parts originate from a PC where the temps were high and I wanted to redo the thermal grease and ended up breaking the motherboard and unfortunately I bent the pins in the CPU too (5800XT). Bending the pins was dumb.

Anyway, I just can't find a reason to build an AM4 PC even though the RAM is "free". It's just not worth it. If you need 64GB+ of RAM and the DDR4 vs DDR5 difference isn't significant to you then maybe it's worth it. Otherwise, you can still buy a 32GB DDR5 PC for similar prices to last year sometimes. It's not worth buying any AM4 CPU then the 7500X3D/7600X3D/7800X3D are so much better for the same price.

The 5800X3D re-release is kinda funny. AMD claims they had to do significant re-engineering but it is my understanding they stopped selling it in the US but were still selling it overseas. So did production really stop? Anyway, the price seems to be $349. If so, that's completely not worth it. It's the same price as the 7800X#D, which is significantly better.

As an example, here's a 7800X3D + motherboard + 32GB DDR5 bundle you can buy today for $629 if you happen to live near a Micro Center [1]. No AM4 option is going to compete with that, particularly not with a $349 CPU.

[1]: https://www.microcenter.com/product/5007391/amd-ryzen-7-7800...

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would require having actual technological flair beyond 'buying potential competitors'

Indeed... I am starting to be convinced he's only good in terms of running social media apparatuses.

I think Zuckerberg is pretty out of touch with how people actually live and that makes him pretty blind to the actual implications of these technologies. It's too easy to become enamored of technologies and way too hard to find actual applications for them where the technology makes things better rather than just different.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.

I get results comparable to the saas. Maybe Anthropic sold you too much crack tokens.

I suspect that a lot of people are ignoring the shift to a model where you feed entire specifications to a group of models in differing configurations controlling different aspects of the development task. In that model it doesn't really matter how fast the tokens are generated, only that they are eventually generated and that the assembly is good enough. It's a specification compiler at that point.

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

#275
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memory in the PC I put together early last year is now worth about three times the total cost of all the parts I used to build the thing. It is absolutely crazy.

You could get a 990pro 2 terabyte Samsung SSD for €150 just last year. Memory had become a commodity product.

I did buy one of those for 155eur on 9 November 2025.

Very lucky me!

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

#276
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 know it's an unpopular opinion on Hacker News but I think most people are overstating the damage to the economy. Increased demand starts to pull more advancements forward and increase spending on production, which benefits everyone. Transformer demand is real, but what percentage of your electricity bill…

The damage is not merely in the increased demand for electricity. Actually, assuming governments get their heads out of the sand about energy poverty, cheap solar, wind, and batteries will fix that. The real problem is all the other crowding-out of investment that having one big megahit technology can do.

Let's say you're an alchemist living in ancient China. You discover some kind of strange material made out of melted sand and want to sell some of it as a drinking vessel. One problem: everyone already uses porcelain for that purpose, which holds hot drinks without cracking like your strange sand ones do. So you toss that in the trash and move onto the next attempt at making an elixir of life.

Problem is, what you invented was a kind of glass; which has no economic niche in the society you live in. Some funny other places in the far west might invent it, though - hell, they might even figure out that you can grind this material down into lenses and discover an entire field of magic - optics - that you discarded because nobody needed tea cups that crack when you put tea in them.

Now, let's say you live in a society that has access to some kind of artificial intelligence. You are going to chuck the AI at absolutely everything, because on average, it tends to be better at all the problems you throw at it. Even simple things like spell-checkers get turned into AI invocations because, well, the Bitter Lesson dictates that having enough compute and learning to throw at the problem will always yield a better result than hard-coded nonsense logic that demos well. And even if you want to, well, you couldn't afford the RAM to run modern vibe-coded slop software anyway. Porcelain crowds out investment in glass, and as a result, we are limited to only having technologies that can be made by or from a pile of stolen books tied together with a bunch of matrix multiplies.

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

#277
Not protecting the consumer segment, as well as industrial, corporate and government usages is not fair and a short term move in a democracy, in particular with who is in management these days

Now some will bill Taiwan and Korea the same way they bill consumers and industries when they need RAM, should they need us.

Chinese companies were at least producing more and more to brace for restrictions from western manufacturers

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

#278

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.

This...

Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling...

...plus the recent price increases by AI companies, made me actually think the opposite: that there might be another additional "run" for memory and/or GPUs.

Therefore, yesterday I decided to order an additional RTX 5060 with 16 GiB VRAM for the ~500$ that I saved during the last months (to be added to the RTX 5070 12 GiB that I bought last year to play games in 4k + my old RTX 3060 12 GiB which I recycled a few months ago after noticing how nice it is to run llama.cpp locally without having to worry about subscription costs).

The original 24 GiB VRAM were actually quite enough for some of the stuff that I do (e.g. transcribe text of image scans of old magazines, coding with Aider, etc - I usually use Q5_K_M quantizations of Qwen & Gemma by Bartowski as lower ones delivered sometimes weird results and/or looped forever in "thinking"-mode), but I guess that with 40 GiB I should be bullet-proof for my pessimistic view of our future :o)

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value of my desktop pc has almost doubled, my ps5 is worth ~ $150 more than I bought it years ago. It's gotten to the point where nvidia doesn't even bother to report their gaming revenue anymore. It's a clear sign that we're back to the bad old days of pc gaming being a 'prosumer' hobby, but don't worry I'm sure nvidia and their ilk are salivating at the idea of making pc gaming into a streaming stadia like solu…

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Sohcahtoa82/saved/n76zkL I think I paid a total of around $5,500 for the current components of my PC. Hard to say for sure since my PC has been a Ship of Theseus for over 30 years and started as a 486. The link merely reflects its current state. At one point, PCPartPicker was showing my PC as worth $11,000. It's now at $7,200 without including the RAM or PSU . That would put it at $9,000…

There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though.

You can get a $200 to $300 microcenter cpu+motherboard+16GB DDR5 bundle [1], then $300-$400 GPU, and you'll be able to play nearly every game on the market just fine at 1080p.

I'm sure there are pre-builts using stockpiled RAM that are similar $1000 price range.

And if you buy used you can do even better. $300-400 might get you a 5060 or a 9060XT right now [2][3] but if you go used you can get something like a 3080 instead.

I play games at 1080p with a 1660 Ti and, outside of some newer UE5 games that heavily rely on frame gen for performance (Monster Hunter Wilds performance was too poor to play), everything I've thrown at it has been playable and some games even 100+ FPS.

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

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=594,593&sort...

[3] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#c=596&sort=pri...

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

#280
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.

People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.
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