I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
As a silver lining, you think this could stabilize GPU prices? Or at least CPU prices?
If there’s less RAM/SSDs to build PCs with, then people will buy fewer GPUs/CPUs for them.
GPUs also need memory. So they aren’t escaping this from a consumer POV. Not to mention how production capacity is still being sucked up data centres, but now for AI.
DDR4 is serviceable to me.
Here’s some actual advice for PC builders - what do you actually want from your system? Nothing you say can be vague, you have to set up goals. That’s the entire important note of PC building is what you’re building it for and how long you want it to last for as in, how long until you’re wanting to build another?
Yeah. I’m on a relatively old build with DDR4, but still a decent processor and GPU. So far gaming have not been an issue with whatever I’m throwing at it. Not much in the way of loading times, and no real problem with the size of it. Some less game-y stuff, like video transcoding and 3D renders, also fine. And while I can see those improving somewhat with DDR5, I’m not sure it’s the actual bottleneck. And gaming won’t be much better with it… I mean seriously, moving loading times from 3 seconds to 2? I don’t really care.
The real issue will be when things starts to break down, as hardware do over time. It’s not that I want to replace the hardware if there’s no pressure from the software side, but I will have to if RAM goes bad, or motherboard decide to not power up.
I want to be able to run VRChat at high FPS even in the fanciest of settings with a lot of high quality avatars.
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
One thing I’ve run into is not performance with old hardware but missing features from the CPU/GPU. Think of tpm 2.0 requirements for Windows 11. There’s other obscure instruction sets that newer games and programs require such as resizeable bar if you want to run a local llm.
My PC currently experiences a memory overload if I play ~150mods Skyrim for more than 2 hours straight. I currently have 16gb DDR4, Gtx1660 Nvidia. My thoughts are that the graphics card is the weak link but those are still too big a ticket.
If it’s a leak in a mod and some pages just aren’t being accessed at all, then I’d think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don’t need all that much space to just store swap, and it’s vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal
I have no idea the degree to which “lots of cheap, fast swap” helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it’ll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.
If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it’ll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don’t expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn’t need to last forever.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
Sadly it may actually be your ram. I had a 1660 until a couple months ago and the card kept up fine, at least for older games. With 16gb of memory though my system kept bottlenecking. Upgrading to 32 was like a breath of fresh air
Playing it on a lean linux distro (or simply neutering Windows heavily) helps a ton. There’s tons of Windows stuff that just sits in the background for no reason.
There are also texture optimizers for Skyrim, and some other performance mods.
Why do you need a computer? Here is the AI on your smartphone, enjoy!
The best we can do is just wait when price will fall down after ai bubble will explode
The ai bubble will never pop.
Safeguards have been removed from the market and too many rich people are balls deep. Markets will be manipulated and prices will continue to soar.
nah, it’s a casino. crash will come eventually, the complication is that both bulls and bears want the same thing in the end…higher those lines go up the more $ the people who know how much the underlying is actually worth can cash out.
a crash/correction is just someone cashing out and either not putting the $ back in or atleast actually putting thought behind how they put it back in. the real suckers are the ones buying into everything automatically no matter the price.
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
I built a decent PC a couple years ago, and I don’t need to upgrade often since I don’t really care about cutting edge. So I kinda dodged a bullet, but, this sucks.
Honestly the incentive to “upgrade” a gaming PC the past decade is really weak. Aside from a few AAA titles almost all games run just fine on old hardware. Particularly if you ditch Windows.
So let’s just all refuse to buy this overpriced shit. The same price increases have already happened to GPUs and gamers felt like they “needed” to pay those prices still, nah fuck that, don’t give these greedy pigs a dime.
I’m worried that they’re trying to price us into not owning our machines anymore. You will own nothing and rent from us strategy.
I hear you, you makes sense, but that way lies the death of personal general computing, which would be a crying shame. You’ll have nothing and (won’t) like it a few years later, SaaS taking over powered by all those ‘AI’ datacentres. Peak phone could even have happened if RAM becomes prohibitive, instead they’re just windows on an all centralized, subscription web services. I see it as a pretty existential threat for my preferred way of life.
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
not necessarily with hardware though. now they are flush with investments and have holes burning in their pockets. everyone is trying to get in on the first stage of AI datacenters.
they may artificially extend the bubble, but rapid hardware expansion/refreshing will be the first thing to slow down or stop when they see it’s not providing value.
Im going to get me a dual CPU thread riper server for $399 when the crash happens!
As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.
I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they’ve been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn’t even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.
12th-gen CPUs are safe.
Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.
I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).
EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.
EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD’s AM5-socket processors, they can’t use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.
I waited too long to buy a new PC. I thought the later, the better. And now this.
Well, Windows 10 support runs until October 2026.
if you can’t switch to linux, upgrade windows to LTSC. massgrave.dev is your friend, they have installers and an activator, maybe it can even change the windows type without reinstall.
and then start planning your transition to linux. don’t overthink it, just what you need, and what files you need over there, especially before deleting windows. fedora kde edition is a good starter distro, you shouldn’t need to tinker it if you don’t want
Yeah, this will make RAM prices cheaper. For sure.
The sirens of Linux call to you in the meantime.
Yes, 30 years ago.
Long time user, first time caller.
What… what does that mean?
S.u.S.E. Linux April 1995.
Windows 10 ltsc?
I assume this:
The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.
Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.
If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11.
Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store.
“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.
So you can get one extra year, but you need to tie the PC’s Administrator account to a Microsoft account, and either need to pay a $30 subscription fee, spend their Microsoft Rewards points, or set the PC to sync to their cloud service.
The normal Windows 10. ESU in the European Economic Area (EEA).
I thought the later, the better
Well, usually that is true.
Not a hardware fix, but there’s memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:
Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I’ve mentioned here recently. I don’t know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.
Is it time to start shucking mini pcs and game consoles?
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it? Anyone do this?
My old HTPC is running a Z87 motherboard with a 4770k i5 cpu with 16gb of ddr3 ram. It is chugging along. I had plans to build out something new in the same case but I don’t want to feed into this bullshit by buying now. The more people show their willingness to pay these prices the happier manufacturers and retailers will be to charge them. But I think it might get worse, too, and maybe not better. Ugh.
Whatever I build might be the last one I do considering how long I kept this one.
I just bought a used HP office computer basically for the 32 GB of DDR5 (only 5200 but I’ll take it) on eBay. Just gonna throw a 9060xt in it for now. Combined its a sub 700 build. I’ll probably swap it to a new mobo and case next year as the power supply is a little underspeccd and I believe the HP pinout is nonstandard. Maybe I’ll just jam a flex PSU in there and pin the cables to match.
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it?
I’m sure that you could do that, but I think part of the problem there is that everyone else is going to be in the same boat, short of RAM, and I’m not sure what demand there is for a gaming PC stripped of its RAM.
If there isn’t much demand, you might have trouble recouping what you spent on the parts you don’t want.
I read one article that CPU prices may drop, because the increased RAM prices will drive up PC prices, price some people out of the market, and so there will be less demand for CPUs.
That’s an interesting theory on the CPUs. Though it walways takes longer for prices to drop than it does to rise. I’ll be keeping an eye out.
You’re right that selling the parts may not actually be profitable or even recoup expenses. Though I was thinking I had a gpu that’s decent enough for my 1080p gaming so could sell whatever 5000 series comes with it for cheap and give someone a nice deal.
Removed by mod
I don’t like that this was removed, but it is very ironic for a AI summary about AI hype fueling a RAM shortage. It was at least properaly labeled and attributes and an open source model.
