Hardware & Technical RAM prices

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Friend of mine after LANparty and borrowing my own sticks with the lulz of RAMdrive 10GbE network share insanity, was interested in buying some for himself.

Then he saw the price on Amazon :(

$2k for 128Gb , only 3Ghz DDR4 - what on earth caused that?
 

Jon flint

Jon flint
Ram prices have been crazy for a while now, my own measly 32gb (3200mhz cl14) cost £530 (~$740).

Manufacturers claim supply shortages have driven up the prices.

To be honest, $2k for a massive 128gb seems like a bit of a bargain!
 

Zak Gordon

Zak Gordon
Yeah RAM and GPU prices have been out off whack for a while now. It has certainly put me off upgrades in those area's, and makes it unlikely i will be building a new PC for a while longer.
 

Dural

Dural
Bit sticks have always been expensive. You pay more for 1 stick than 2 sticks half the size beyond 16GB IIRC. I expect it's because they sell a lot fewer of the larger size. Memory is up 20% on what it was 18 months ago. Companies caching in on crypto mining hardware I expect.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Asp Explorer said:
$2k for 128Gb , only 3Ghz DDR4 - what on earth caused that?
Click to expand...

Combination of short term hiccups in production that lead to long term collusion and price fixing among top DRAM manufacturers.

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...spikes-in-wake-of-hynix-fire-but-for-how-long -- the answer seems to be "five years".

Also, every ten years or so, DRAM makers get sued for price fixing, realize they made way the hell more money when they were price fixing than they had to pay in fines the last time, and do it again.

https://www.google.com/search?q=DRAM+price+fixing&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X

1998-2002 they fixed prices and got hit with a multiple hundreds of millions in fines and fees, after more than a decade of litigation. Of course, they made ten times as much because of the price fixing, so they are doing it again.
 
Last edited:

Necronaught

Necronaught
just paid 69 quid on Amazon for a Crucial 8 GB DDR4 SODIMM @2400. My laptop came with a Crucial 8GB @2133. which was going for 95 quid at Novatech and 90 something on Amazon. I did some research multiple sources said it would be fine and it's been great. Sadly the only perceivable difference is in the speed of alt tabbing games. Perhaps upgrading my storage drive to an SSD would have been a worthier buy.

I'm surprised that 8GB is still enough for gaming. Oh well future proofing is always good.
 
Last edited:

the100thmonkey

the100thmonkey
Necronaught said:
just paid 69 quid on Amazon for a Crucial 8 GB DDR4 SODIMM @2400. My laptop came with a Crucial 8GB @2133. which was going for 95 quid at Novatech and 90 something on Amazon. I did some research multiple sources said it would be fine and it's been great. Sadly the only perceivable difference is in the speed of alt tabbing games. Perhaps upgrading my storage drive to an SSD would have been a worthier buy.

I'm surprised that 8GB is still enough for gaming. Oh well future proofing is always good.
Click to expand...
Try BF1. It works far better with 12-16GB in dual channel. The client itself pushes >6GB RAM normally.
 

Pville_Piper

Pville_Piper
the100thmonkey said:
Try BF1. It works far better with 12-16GB in dual channel. The client itself pushes >6GB RAM normally.
Click to expand...

BF1 is very demanding... My old 3570K couldn't keep up with it. Over clocking it helped but all 4 cores were running fully utilized. Upgraded to a I7 6700K and now my GTX 970 gets a workout.
 

Zak Gordon

Zak Gordon
I just got an extra matching 8GB stick for my main PC, and it was exactly double the price i had paid for it originally about 4 years ago :(
 

craigomez

C
hello,
If DDR4 prices were following a standard cost curve, you’d expect faster DRAM clocks to loosely correlate with higher costs. Instead, the costs are fairly compressed below a certain point. You can buy 16GB DDR4-2133 for $168 or DDR4-3000 for $170. DDR4-3200 is selling for just (“just”) $180. Above this point, DDR4-3333 still demands a price premium, at $220, and the prices increase from that point forward.
The explanation for this spiking is that mobile demand for DDR4 has stripped the market bare. That’s possible, but LPDDR4 and LPDDR4X are not identical to DDR4, and it’s not as simple as building DDR4 and then binning it to see what kind of memory you have. And according to DigiTimes, mobile DRAM inventory levels are spiking at smartphone manufacturers, with some companies carrying 2x the load they were as weak demand for devices and skyrocketing prices bite into smartphone profit margins as well. Overall smartphone sales grew slightly in 2017, but not at the kind of meteoric rate we saw in earlier years.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom