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.
How about just don’t buy a PC for now? I’m sure the machine you’ve got in good enough. Just hang on to it until the prices come back down
Yeah, it sucks though. It feels like building a PC has been inadvisable more often than not. Thanks to the GPU prices being ridiculous a while back. Now this. It’s crazy that you have to time building a PC between these stupid waves.
True! It is frustrating. I fear the days of custom PC builds are coming to an end.
Even before this recent price hike it was a lot more expensive than it used to be.
My old i7 4790k with DDR3 can run for a little longer…
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.
deleted by creator
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.
How much RAM does a time machine require because that seems to be the basic advice here.
Why do you need a computer? Here is the AI on your smartphone, enjoy!
“Do you guys not have phones?“
I guess my ageing i5-8400, 16GB, GTX 1060 rig can keep hobbling along a while yet.
Although I was amused to see my Legion Go S actually has a more powerful CPU now.
Did some server maintenance yesterday, including driver updates. Broke my system since it updated my Nvidia driver to 590.x which no longer supports our little 1060s. Had to roll back the driver, thankfully easy. Suppose I better start keeping an eye out for some sort of upgrade…
Amd 9070xt and 9060xt options are probably the best you are going to get for the next 2 years.
Dont buy Nvidia again. They just end of lifed the 10th most popular GPU used with Steam.
Nah, it’s not doing a lot of heavy lifting on my server, it’ll be good for years to come most likely
IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.
They are manufacturing only 35% of consumer ram compared to what they were before? The supply is really going down?
It’s by choice. Samsung did announce recently that they are going back to consumer ram production instead of trying to compete for low margin big contracts on current gen hbm. At half of current prices, ddr5 is more profitable than HBM even for hynix (leader).
They have to have more than enough ram bought up at some point, cant be scaling up infinitely
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.
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.
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.
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.
well, not the main topic, but no need to be hostile, the last sentence made me think this is another problem to you
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.
I just built a PC with 64GB Ram Corsair Vengeance 2 months ago. Paid 250€, quite expensive IMO (was used to more like 50€ ten years ago). But who pays 1000€???
There are those who are willing to pay 400% increases in price for the goods.
That’s actually pretty solid hardware lol get a grip
It still works fine most of the time with a 1080p Monitor :)
I play with less on 2k 120fps
64GB of DDR3 RAM in a system of that era is straight nuts!
I got a good deal where it was cheaper than the 32gb I intended to have :D It’s DDR4 btw. So it might be worth the whole system soon (1000k for the whole computer in 2017)
Ah, completely forgot that Intel 6th gen introduced DDR4 - I would’ve sworn it was much more recent than that!
You’ve certainly gotten your money’s worth out of your system - that’s for sure!
I went from a 3570K, 16GB, GTX 670 -> GTX 1080 (later SLI’d), to my current rig:
5950X, 32GB, RTX 3090 -> RX 7900 XTX
Just before the Ethereum mining rush took off, and with the current pricing due to AI fuckery - I don’t think I’ll be switching up anytime soon.
Gratz! That seems like you got really good timing to upgrade and then hold on for a bit :)
Yeah, in hindsight it really landed at an opportune time.
It’s a crying shame how greedy companies like Nvidia & Micron have gotten from back-to-back runs on their products - it feel like it will take a generational downturn for them to pull their heads in, and return to the more modest profit margins of the past (which even then was around 30%, IIRC).
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they’ve already done the technical work).
I think there are already community tools for texture management and decompression.
And… I don’t know. There’s such a critical mass of mods now that it doesn’t seem worth breaking compatibility with them all once again?
The Skyrim mod scene is actually extremely messy; if you look at other bigs ones (like, say, Stardew Valley), there’s a lot more cohesiveness and performance consciousness among modders. Or Mass Effect, which is more consolidated amongst a few big modsz
So I think the Skyrim community could do a better job of creating an easier to set up, more performant out-of-the-box experience for players, even as jank as the game is. But the game just has a different culture around it, I think.
Funny enough, I’m actually running bazzite. That’s why i know there’s a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol
Well, just to rule it out, have you tried Windows? Like a neutered windows with defender disabled and such.
I’ve found that Linux can get rather fussy under high memory pressure. It works and doesn’t crash, but it also really bogs down anything high performance once the swapping begins.
It can also get fussy with Nvidia.
So I’m not saying Skyrim will run better on Windows, but it might be worth a shot.
I run CachyOS, yet I still keep Windows around for some other heavily modded games.
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
That’s exactly what I’m thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I’m not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I’m just miffed that I said I’d get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.
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/dp/B0FY4CQRYF
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.
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.
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
Don’t buy a DDR 5 mobo?
I wouldn’t have but AM5 requires it.
Instructions unclear. Purchased a 5090, 9800X3D and 64gb DDR5 RAM for playing Terraria. Also, it has shiny lights.
I want:
- Multitasking speed
- Fast SSD storage for dev tasks, builds…etc
- Large SSD storage for games
- Memory to run multiple development environments, lots of research tabs, and not have to turn them off to go play a game for a couple hours
- A GPU capable of playing most games on decent settings on a 4k monitor (upscaling allowed)
So generally this means:
- mid-high end CPU
- mid GPU
- 64+ GB RAM
- 1x High Performance 1TB m.2 SSD as primary drive
- 1x w/e 2TB m.2 SSD for secondary
RAM prices makes this… Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it’s about 5 years old now, and it’s time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM…
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn’t actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn’t the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what’s eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I’d expect it to be pretty effective.
dev tasks, builds…etc
I don’t know how applicable it is to your use case, but there’s ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla’s sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven’t used it myself.
My predicament, personally, is that my computer is starting to feel slow to me but I’m on AM4 and ddr4. The good jumps in performance are to be had in moving to the newer generations, which means that buying ram cannot be avoided. The suboptimal move is to stay on this legacy platform and be satisfied with marginal gains while investing further into hardware that will become obsolete sooner
Or use zram/zswap on Linux with ZSTD compression, which dedicates part of physical RAM to compressed swap.
I want to be able to run VRChat at high FPS even in the fanciest of settings with a lot of high quality avatars.
I haven’t used it, but my understanding is that it’s vaguely like Second Life, popular with folks creating adult-content-oriented-worlds.
From a technical standpoint, that might actually be a pretty good example of a game that would benefit from cloud gaming, since I assume that it’s not all that latency-critical, not the way an FPS would be.
I guess that there would potentially be privacy issues with adult content stuff that would argue against cloud hosting, but in the case of VRChat, the service itself is already living in the cloud, so…shrugs
VR doesn’t work with cloud gaming, the latency would make you throw up immediately.
That’s fair, but my understanding is that VRChat, despite the name, isn’t a VR-only thing.
DDR6 will be about to release by the time RAM prices return to normal…
So do we expect the cost of gpu’s to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier
Top GPUs used to be like 600CAD. Then the covid thing happened and they’ve never come back down.
True! Luckily I’ll always aim below the top of the line.
Yes GPU prices will rise too.
Is it time to start shucking mini pcs and game consoles?
Too late already, pricing on those went up within a week or two. Best you can hope for is second hand market from sellers who dont know what they have.
I guess my 96GB of RAM from 3 years ago will still hold up for another decade.
