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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

#281

Post by TheAmazingRace »

drnick1 wrote: post #249
functionmouse wrote: post #32

I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.

Presumably, this is at 1080p, which looks terrible after you experienced 4K. It's better than nothing, and I probably wouldn't build a 4K rig in this market, but let's not pretend you can get a modern gaming experience out of that old hardware.

In my humble opinion, 4K gaming is rather overrated. I find high refresh rates at 1440p to be the sweet spot and you don't have to get a top-end GPU to drive it at ultra settings in games.

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

#282

Post by cogman10 »

fluoridation wrote: post #253
varispeed wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what kind of coding, but for my case it's been useless. Not working code almost every time. It's much quicker to just write it by hand than use that model.

I've been experimenting with Qwen3 Coder Next and Copilot for a little Rust toy project and it's been trucking along. It does require a fair bit of hand-holding (or perhaps I just don't trust it to give it larger tasks), but it works alright.

Give 3.5 or 3.6 a shot. 3.5 has smaller models that you could leverage. If you can swing it, though, 3.6 27B is quite good.

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

#283

Post by maxnevermind »

elric wrote: post #140

How much of is this is actually due to the AI hype cycle, and what's the impact of the global energy clusterfuck that is the Strait of Hormuz?

I was also wondering if it will result in Helium shortage and even higher prices the next few years, then/if it will be all over, new fabs might also come online and it will be the opposite - a glut. I believe that follows the historic pattern of boom and bust cycles of chip production.

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

#284

Post by overfeed »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #226
overfeed wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most commodity shortages like this end in a glut The 3 RAM manufactures know this too, from painful experience. There won't be a glut this cycle because there are no capacity build-outs. Instead of increasing capacity, some OEMs left the consumer segment to focus on enterprise AI. > Calling this kind of demand economic damage is odd. It's not odd at all because the complementary industries are being damaged - possi…

Good that there is a _fourth_ one. That's actively ramping up and looking to increase market share. CXMT.

The big 3 are the only ones capable of bringing forth a glut, IMO. Of the Chinese challengers, CXMT is the frontrunner, there's also JHICC and others, but I don't think any of them will have sizable volumes in the next 2 years, despite extremely favorable market conditions. This is not a dig against them; they (and their domestic vendors) will need time and experience to get the yields up, and will undoubtedly eventually dominate the consumer market in about 5 years, according to my outsider crystal ball.

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

#285

Post by 4k0hz »

mcmcmc wrote: post #258
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

The knee jerk gamer reaction that everything will be pushed to cloud gaming I think is unrealistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see higher end workstations or gaming PCs move to a leasing model or something like carrier subsidized smartphones, where you lock into a contract with an upgrade cycle

I doubt it. Desktops don't add substantial hardware features often or get damaged in the same way phones do.

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

#286

Post by chrismorgan »

fullstop wrote: post #16
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.

I regret not building the PC when I was looking at it. It's not a money thing, at the end of the day, but I can't bring myself to do it. I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time. My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)

Similar situation—just as I was about to buy, an emergency occurred, and when I came back two months later my ₹1,00,000 build was ₹1,20,000, and I felt I couldn’t quite justify it any more. And after all, my laptop had stabilised and no longer seemed to be dying like it had been a year earlier. Well, now my build would be ₹1,75,000 and feeling even less justified.

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

#287

Post by xboxnolifes »

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)…

RAM is now 4 times as expensive for the people who need it. Yes, economic damage. Its not like RAM was always sold out prior to this.

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

#290

Post by wahern »

zozbot234 wrote: post #231
KptMarchewa wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good that there is a _fourth_ one. That's actively ramping up and looking to increase market share. CXMT.

CXMT is a tiny supplier, it will take years before they significantly expand the market. They're pretty much in the same boat as Samsung and SK Hynix, they just have less of an incentive to actively curtail supply.

For some definitions of tiny. Their current monthly wafer production is about 1/2 that of Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron. They're rapidly expanding, but so are the others, so they're unlikely to catch up anytime soon, but that alone doesn't make them tiny. Maybe tiny in the HBM space or even DDR5, given their trailing process nodes.
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