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

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

#81
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…

For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg.

I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.

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

#83
post #19
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> two versions of the same phone with different processors That's hilarious, which phone is this?

Not one phone, they did this all over the place. Their flagship line did this starting with the Galaxy S7 all the way up to Galaxy S24. Only the most recent Galaxy S25 is Qualcomm Snapdragon only, supposedly because their own Exynos couldn't hit volume production fast enough.

"Galaxy S II" and its aesthetics was already a mere branding shared across at least four different phones with different SoCs, before counting in sub-variants that share same SoCs. This isn't unique to Samsung, nor is it a new phenomenon, just how consumer products are made and sold.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II

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

#84
post #9
post #5

To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same devi…

To be honest, this actually sounds kinda healthy.

Yeah, makes absolute sense.

A bit like Toyota putting a GM engine in their car, because the Toyota engine division is too self-centered, focusing to much on efficiency.

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

#85
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…

> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.

> The mid 90s was pretty scary too.

If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad.

You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.

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

#86
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…

I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.

The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.

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

#87
post #75
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…

What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev enviro…

Every hardware update for me involves hours or sometimes days of faffing with drivers and config and working round new bugs.

Nobody is paying for that time.

And whilst it is 'training', my training time is better spent elsewhere than battling with why cuda won't work on my GPU upgrade.

Therefore, I avoid hardware and software changes merely because a tiny bit more speed isn't worth the hours I'll put in.

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

#88
post #75
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…

What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev enviro…

My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4 build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for that upgrade.

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

#90
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…

> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that. 25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices. I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in…

> But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.

The soon to be unemployed SV engineers when LLM's mean anyone can design an app and backend with no coding knowledge.

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