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

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

#381

Post by whizzter » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

gaigalas wrote: post #209

elAhmo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are saying there will be even more demand for RAM and that will cause the prices to crash?

Perhaps all hobbyst developers interested in local AI combined is a smaller demand than AI companies hoarding parts. That would make demand decrease.

Exactly, AI firms can and will pay premium to hoard, and without that pressure hobbyists and regular users will let demand slide down to "normal" levels.

Except, Chinese firms have entered the market now to capture the public market while the "top tier" firms supply AI firms. If the AI firms stops buying everything the toptier firms will come back into a market that has begun to be overrun by cheaper Chinese alternatives. It could get damn bloody (but good for consumers).

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

#382

Post by gaigalas » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

whizzter wrote: post #381

gaigalas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps all hobbyst developers interested in local AI combined is a smaller demand than AI companies hoarding parts. That would make demand decrease.

Exactly, AI firms can and will pay premium to hoard, and without that pressure hobbyists and regular users will let demand slide down to "normal" levels. Except, Chinese firms have entered the market now to capture the public market while the "top tier" firms supply AI firms. If the AI firms stops buying everything the toptier firms will come back into a market that has begun to be overrun by cheaper Chinese alternat…

Lots of cheap chinese RAM is exactly what we need right now. RAM used to be cheap, it was a common excuse for not optimizing software 10 years ago ("this thing is cheap, don't worry about Electron!")

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

#383

Post by pjjpo » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #368

saltcured wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get it, the Beige Box of Theseus. I guess most would probably assume at least one epic refresh where there wasn't really anything carried across except maybe the parking spot on your desk. And since the 486 era, most probably expect your desk and/or physical site changed too. There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors, external peripheral buses, HDD controller types, expan…

> There were so many potential PC era boundaries like case and motherboard form factors Only one change really from AT/Baby AT to ATX. We've been on ATX now for 30 years. I could grab an A-Bit BH6 motherboard from 1998 and put it in my modern Hyte Y60 case if I wanted to. > external peripheral buses Since we're talking starting from 486 era, that only means going from PS/2 to USB for keyboard/mouse, parallel port for…

Can see moving parts into a new case as being just a transition, and then replacements from there continuing the treadmill.

But it would have been much cooler if you were still on the 486 era case :D

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

#384

Post by gck1 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:11 PM UTC

My unraid server alerted me today that one of the 28TB HDDs is at 100% capacity. I bought that drive for $290, a year ago. Today, it costs $590.

I'm at least happy I went for DDR4 RAM when I was building this server.

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

#385

Post by gck1 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

Danox wrote: post #177

Take memory in house Apple (the talent is already there) its time again to kick another hardware supplier out and move on ala Intel, Nvidia, AMD, IBM, and Qualcomm outgoing in 2027-2028 if you want to continue to built devices and actually sell something to the public.

I'm curious, how is Apple seemingly unaffected by this RAM supply crunch? Why are they not increasing prices 2x/3x?

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

#386

Post by Altern4tiveAcc » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

ragequittah wrote: post #362

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brother, I'm on a 3070 Ti and I can play basically all games at full settings at 1900x1200 resolution. I've only found one game where I had to turn the settings down (Talos Principle 2). Most games aren't really demanding.

I suppose if you turn off ray tracing and don't mind 1900x1200. I'm trying to push 1440p w/ ray tracing. Sometimes 4k if it's a good TV game. I'm constantly having to turn settings down to get >60 fps. These days more and more games seem like they expect some sort of ray tracing to get the full experience. It's also quite nice to actually hit 165 fps in some less demanding games on my 165 hz monitor.

I guess you and the other poster just have different standards.

I've personally never found Ray Tracing to be worth the performance impact. I have a 3090 and a 7900 XT at home, on different computers. When opening a new game, I just keep everything on Medium, turn RT off if possible, and enjoy good fps at 4K in most games.

Doom The Dark Ages was the only one that didn't perform as well as I'd like. Still, perfectly playable at 1080p, Medium settings, targeting 120+ fps.

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

#387

Post by jansommer » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:06 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #305

Brybry wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>There's nothing wrong with 1080p gaming though Yeah. 4K is nice for text, but doesn't seem like a great deal for gaming given the 4x hardware requirement and/or weirdo interpolation technologies that may or may not work on AMD + Linux anyway.

4k is really nice for text. Always annoyed by 1080p screens for work. But yeah gaming - 1080p is fine. I have a 9060 XT and I play games at 4k like Mortal Kombat X, Fallout 4, Evil Within 2, Dead Space Remastered and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. All 60+ fps on Linux and an ancient cpu.

Doom: The Dark Ages is 1440p and still looks great.

Total waste of money paying so much more for a gpu unless you want local ai, and those weirdo interpolation technologies are a pain in the a* to get working.

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

#388

Post by gwerbin » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

zargon wrote: post #238

brnaftr361 wrote: post #8

GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

Consumer oriented parts businesses are going to go out of business from this. Motherboards, cases, coolers, power supplies, fans, etc. At this point it's a matter of how many. Selection and competition will be permanently reduced, as I don't see these types of companies coming back any time soon.

Oopsie I guess a few big industry giants need to step in to fulfill the demand. It's not technically an illegal monopoly if all the small players just so happen to go out of business!

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

#389

Post by david422 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 2:01 PM UTC

snkline wrote: post #17

Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #5

This is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.

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.

I put together a new PC last year and got some extra memory, because why not. Crazy how much that would cost me today.

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

#390

Post by frankieg33 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

usui wrote: post #12

I looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!

that was a great deal.

$86.30 for my 32gb DDR4 3200 stick Oct 2022. So glad I bought that. I have a mini-itx board and one of the ram slots died so i was forced to upgrade to a single stick. the historic trend of price deflation in computer components has always had me leaning toward not upgrading my set up.

fortunately all i play now are "premium" web browser games like narrow.one and eggball, ha! going to be hurting when GTA 6 launches with my 3050/1070 gpus...