Upgraded my homelab with 256GB right before the prices went nuts. Lucky me.
But before I bought the best GPU at the time for absolute peak-price, adamant it would rise further and never going back.
So…universe equalized for me. For now.
this sucks because I can function at 16 now but I have to juggle things more and I know I use less than the typical power user. I could survive at at 8 but it will be a massive pain.
My CostCo is selling a gaming PC for $1,300, with 64gb of DDR5 and a RTX 5060. If that is a decent deal, go pick one up before the oil shocks start to really hit.
Depends on other things as well. It could be a decent deal but a pre built PC rarely is, even pre covid.
I always go for a custom build myself. Got a Thor NAS chassis, I am just waiting for de-dollarization and the AI bubble to pop, so that I can use my Euros to build a top-shelf PC. Debating whether to pick up the motherboard now, since that is more unique component that can potentially stop being available. A Threadripper CPU and the RAM would be more generic.
I just had to buy a m.2 drive. It cost more than double the same item I bought in 2022. It also cost more than the entire computer it’s being installed into! FML.
Basically we will be buying computer parts in specific decades, like this decade is bad for anything memory, last was bad for anything GPU. Next will be bad for, I don’t know, screens or mobos. And so on.
HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.
Building a computer like 5 years from now will be a weird experience because you will buy most parts from brands that you have never heard of. Very few of the manufacturers we know today will still be around by that time.
Much more than doubled. Most high-TB drives are not in stock anywhere, and even if you find a drive, the best deals are around $26-28/TB for used drives, whereas before new deals would be $10/TB. If you’re looking for a specific new capacity, you may be paying $36-40/TB.
I’ve been putting 12tb used SAS drives in my Plex server. The used market went up about 30% from last year for the same drives. I think I paid $115 each before, now they’re $150.
I don’t doubt you found a deal somewhere, but here’s what I’m seeing:
That’s admittedly better than $26/TB, but I also had been looking at 20-24TB drives. That’s the other change - the lowest-$/TB (highest value) TB size is has decreased substantially (from around 20-24 in late 2025, to 10-12 now).
I bought 5 of these last September at $99 each https://ebay.us/m/x9d0kn. When I did some searching about a month ago, I found a couple for around $150 of the same model. So I paid less initially than I thought.
It’s interesting, that’s what I felt was happening, but when I looked at the charts, it seems they are less than double. Either way it feels really expensive.
I think it depends on the drive sizes, whether you accept used, and if we’re comparing bare to shuckable, but yeah, for drives that I am looking for in the 20-26TB range (new, since I don’t have enough parity/redundancy to trust used drives), it seems more like 2.5-4x cost.
I just don’t think people are buying RAM/other PC parts period. new or used.
I’ve have a listing selling a couple year old sticks of 16gb (32gb total) of DDR4 ram for $120 for like 4 weeks now and not a peep from anyone. I’ve seen other listings for ram at similar price points that have also been up for weeks.
So i’m not sure if there’s an actual shortage or people just simply aren’t buying.
Wish I had known this, I just bought 16gb total of ddr4 2 weeks ago bc one stick started failing and spent over $150
That’s so cheap there must be something wrong with them. /s
What’s the speed on them? I made the mistake of not maxing my am4 build when things started going to shit.
Gaming is just going to become a hobby for the rich at this rate. There is no way we can keep up with this.
Gaming is just going to become a hobby for the rich at this rate.
Well in global terms, PC gaming pretty much has been that since forever.
There is no way we can keep up with this.
Reject the AAA slop and you’ll be good. It’s not like anything good comes from them anyway and all their “innovation” is just fancier graphics and physics without any real gameplay, content or story, mainly to justify the overpriced next gen Nvidia card.
Can you even run Balatro without a 3090?!?
This is all true.
I enjoy indie games mostly these days anyways and my game log is gigantic. I can hold out for a long long time.
Just depressing to watch these kinds of prices.
So, two points.
First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.
But, second…I think that some perspective is in order. Set new production aside. Let’s imagine a world where that didn’t happen. In fact, let’s imagine that not a single additional memory chip was going to be produced. Video games were around when I played games on an Atari 2600, to pick an early video game console. I had fun with it. It didn’t have the latest, real-time rendered photorealistic graphics. But…the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Bytes.
There are people building microcontrollers right now that have onboard memory, and those aren’t impacted by this. It’s just the high-density dedicated memory chips that go on DIMMs that are seeing all that demand.
According to Wikipedia, there were 30 million Atari 2600s made. The CPU I currently have in my desktop has a little over 145MB of onboard cache. Twenty-six of those CPUs, looking just at their onboard cache, no external memory from Micron/Samsung/SK Hynix, have more memory than all of the 30 million Atari 2600s ever manufactured, combined.
Like, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy using all this memory that we have had available in recent years. But…video games are here to stay and would be even if no dedicated memory chips were around.
First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.
Where is this optimism coming from? China? Korea?
There are three major DRAM chip manufacturers: Micron, in the US, and Samsung and SK Hynix, both in South Korea.
Micron has two new fabs coming online in Boise, Idaho. The earliest one is scheduled to start operation in the first half of 2027 (they recently announced that they’d moved that timeline up from the second half of 2027) though it’ll take time to ramp up; it will not be doing output at full capacity immediately when it first starts up.
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/id
They announced late last year that they were going to do a second Boise one as well for more capacity.
They also have New York fabs that they’re doing:
https://www.micron.com/us-expansion/ny
For the South Korean manufacturers:
Samsung
This year, Samsung is prioritizing the conversion of its lines to memory chips at its Pyeongtaek campus in Gyeonggi and the acceleration of new facility construction at the site.
At the P4 plant, the company is upgrading dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) production to its latest 1c process, which will be used for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced DRAM chips. Samsung aims to secure 1c capacity of more than 200,000 wafers per month by the end of the year through line conversion and additional equipment installation.
Construction of P5, which had previously been delayed during the semiconductor downturn, resumed this year with a timeline accelerated by roughly six months compared to earlier plans. The chipmaker is bringing in tens of thousands of new workers to construct the megafab, capable of producing HBM, DRAM, NAND flash and potentially foundry chips. Construction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2027, with equipment installation beginning shortly afterward and mass production targeted for the latter part of 2028.
Construction of the last Pyeongtaek facility, P6, is currently expected to start in the third quarter of 2028.
SK Hynix
SK hynix is currently concentrating short-term investment on expanding capacity at its M15X fab in Cheongju, North Chungcheong, while also upgrading older lines.
The company is adding 1b DRAM capacity at M15X, while accelerating 1c node conversions at its M14 and M16 fabs for production of HBM and server DRAM. After hitting a capacity of 10,000 wafers per month last year, it is expected to expand capacity by up to 70,000 wafers per month this year.
For a new greenfield project, SK hynix is advancing construction at the Yongin semiconductor cluster in Gyeonggi, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturing projects globally. The cluster will ultimately host six Samsung fabs from Samsung and four SK hynix facilities, and the latter is moving ahead first.
Construction of the first fab, Y1, is expected to be completed in February of next year, earlier than previously planned. Equipment installation is scheduled to begin in the second quarter of 2027.
Y1 will be built in six cleanroom “phases,” a unit used in fab construction for the capacity expansion stage. Each phase adds more floor space and related equipment for wafer capacity expansion. The first three phases are expected to begin operation within the same year, providing a capacity of 150,000 wafers per month, with the remaining phases adding another 150,000 wafers per month once fully operational.
The second fab in the cluster, Y2, is expected to begin construction around the third quarter of 2028.
As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.
Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You’re likely to get more for your money.
If you’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don’t have prices driven by memory price.
I’m really focusing on saving up for some stickers with flames on them, that’ll speed it up as much as I can afford for a while
Make sure that they are red. That would make the PC become 3x faster.
Have you tried speed holes? They make it go faster.
This is why I’m considering jumping the gun and buying at least the case for the new PC I wanted to get since last year
(My current one doesn’t have a proper side panel so anything would be an upgrade)That is a worst case horror story that everyone should think about, and I’m not usually an optimist, but I don’t think it’s likely.
Ultimately AI is a hype wildfire, and it will eventually run out of fuel - signs are already showing that happening as AI hyperscalers and vendors are ending investments, restricting access and raising prices to recoup unsustainable losses.
At that point, I hope we stay sane and not jump at the first discounts, and just sit tight while prices return to normal. Prices need to fall heavily before we start supporting these AI-first companies again, or else we are going to lock ourselves into that AI-inflated price dystopia.
I long for the day when we get to put up human chandeliers.
I guess I’ll just stay on am4 until the bubble pops then. DDR4 has also gone up, but at least the prices are reasonable
Not really, DDR4 has gone up 3-4x the price as well.
What? Seems to be a thing in your region, cos here in germany prices have “only” risen by factor 2 to 3 at most. Just looked at prices on Amazon for 2x8GB DDR4 ram, the cheapest goes for around 150 Euros. Before, it was 70 Euros.
Used 8gb sticks are cheap on second hand markets, just get a motherboard with shitload of sots
so we will just have to settle for those chinese Mainboards with old intel server CPUs i guess. At least the DDR3 RAM for those is a bit cheaper.
I have 128GB of server ddr3 stashed away somewhere. I’m wondering if the first build since my am4 is going to be an older than that server just because I have the ram.
