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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

pcworld.com

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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#381

Post by imtringued »

kotaKat wrote: post #43
sneak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, becaus…

I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.) I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything . I’m riding rigs…

I assume those aren't US dollars? My suggestion is to go on a classifieds site and find a bargain there. You can find 2x8GB SODIMM DDR4 for like 20€ in Germany, because it's the default configuration for laptops and people are buying aftermarket RAM to upgrade to 2x16GB leaving a glut in 2x8GB configurations. Something similar happened to the desktop DIMMs but to a lesser extent because you can put four of them into a PC.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#382

Post by 71bw »

snerbles wrote: post #352
fooker wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any pointers on how to buy one?

Personally I use eBay and find the most barebones system I can, then populate the CPU+RAM with components salvaged from e-wasted servers. There are risks with this, as I've had to return more than one badly-bent workstation that was packed poorly. --- So the Dell Precision T7920 runs dual Intel Scalable (Skylake) and has oodles of DIMM slots (24!), but you'll need to use a PCIe adapter to run an NVMe drive. FlexBays…

    >and a lot of blink codes when you encounter bad sticks
Which sadly happens quite a lot with ECC DDR4 for whatever reason.

    >If you're feeling cheap and are okay with the previous generation, the Haswell/Broadwell-based T7910 is also serviceable
The T5810 is a known machine, very tinkerable, just works with NVMe adapters (they show up as a normal NVMe boot option in UEFI) and even have TPM 2.0 (!!!) after a BIOS update. Overall, they are the 2nd best affordable Haswell-EP workstations after the HP Z440 in my opinion.

    >E5 v4 revision CPU
They are less efficient than V3 CPUs due to the lockdown of Turbo Boost, but then again on a Precision you'd have to flash the BIOS with an external flasher regardless to get TB back.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#383

Post by jcalvinowens »

sneak wrote: post #375
jermaustin1 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overspending on your tools is a misallocation of resources. An annual $22k spend on computing is around 10-20x over spend for a wealthy individual. I'm in the $200-300k/year, self-employed, buys-my-own-shit camp, and I can't imagine spending 1% of my income on computing needs, let alone close to 10%. There is no way to make that make sense.

It’s not $22k/year, as the hardware still has great resale value when it’s replaced in 14-18 months. It’s less than $8-10k/year when all is said and done. I pay more for my car+insurance.

Look at it a different way: if you'd invested that $10K/year you've been blowing on hardware, how much more money would you have today? How about that $800/month car payment too?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#385

Post by AnthonyMouse »

FireBeyond wrote: post #298
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing. Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're makin…

There are certainly elements of this. And there are also elements like my city, where some of the more notable local business owners and developers are all _way too cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events, fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs together and go on vacation together) which gives them greater influence. All that being said,…

> And there are also elements like my city, where some of the more notable local business owners and developers are all _way too cozy_ with the City Council and Planning/Zoning Boards (like not just rubbing shoulders at community events, fundraisers, but in the "our families rent AirBnBs together and go on vacation together) which gives them greater influence.

But now you're just condemning the zoning board and their cronies as it should be, as opposed to someone else who can't pay higher wages just because real estate got more expensive since it got more expensive for them too.

> Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Which is basically useless in this context because when costs increase you could apply it equally to not raising the minimum wage (the individual has to suck it up) or raising the minimum wage (the small business owner has to suck it up). Meanwhile neither of them should have to suck it up because we should instead be getting the costs back down.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#386

Post by AnthonyMouse »

array_key_first wrote: post #360
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a business can't pay a living wage, it's not really a successful business. Let's consider the implications of this. We take an existing successful business, change absolutely nothing about it, but separately and for unrelated reasons the local population increases and the government prohibits the construction of new housing. Now real estate is more scarce and the business has to pay higher rent, so they're makin…

Successfulness and morality are orthogonal. If you can't make money wherever you're operating your business, then you're not successful.

But in that case they are successful; they're just not paying very much relative to the cost of living as a result of someone else's imposition of artificial scarcity

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#387

Post by cyanydeez »

hug wrote: post #373
cyanydeez wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome fundamentally uses ram ato avoid. What? What a weird LLM apologetics.

If you don’t think Chrome could be way more RAM efficient, and especially if you don’t think the things running inside Chrome could be more efficient, I have a bridge to sell you. If you think acknowledging that fact (and the fact that there’s really not a great way to make LLMs more efficient) is “apologetics”, I cannot engage with you in good faith.

Ok, so LLMs cant be more wfficient....wat

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#388

Post by agapon »

Cerium wrote: post #74
nickjj wrote: post #18

I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…

Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd. Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.

Used RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have also started going up, quickly.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#389

Post by agapon »

legobmw99 wrote: post #200
auspiv wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDR4 prices are up 2-6x in the last couple months depending on frequency. High end, high speed modules (e.g. 128GB 3200MHz LRDIMM) are super expensive.

Isn’t that due to different reasons (like the end of production for older standards)? I recall the same happening shortly after manufacturing for DDR3 ceased, before eventually demand essentially went to 0

Even RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have recently started going up. And I thought that those would be safe, because neither "big AI" nor regular consumers need them.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#390

Post by trollbridge »

fooker wrote: post #340
trollbridge wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some Dell server with dual Xeons and 192GB RAM. It is NUMA but that’s fine for Docker workloads where you can just associate them with a CPU. The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.

Where can I buy something like this for a reasonable price ?

I got it off of eBay, although I paid a lot more than other people do.
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