32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building

Forgeties79

Honestly that seems slightly down even if it’s still ridiculous. The ram I bought for $100 a year ago was $500 a couple of months ago. Could just be the particular sticks I got though

axegon_

"The costs are negligible and justified when compared to all the benefits. If you look at the performance gains, the overall cost has in fact been reduced." - Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.

Scene_Cast2

This is the PCPartPicker chart that I monitor: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5600.... - $900 for 2x32GB, used to be $200 a year ago.

brnaftr361

GN did a documentary on the situation from the perspective of consumer-facing companies. Seems pretty dire for them, and it's hard to see the long-range consequences, but the idea of consumers being priced out isn't too far out, which to me is a little alarming. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

Keyframe

Can we just go back to pre-AI world?

deltoidmaximus

AMD just brought the popular 5800X3D back out of retirement to give people maintaining the DDR4 based platforms something to buy. Last I checked used DDR4 was half the price of used DDR5 after the prices of both shot up.

usui

I looked at my eBay receipt from 2023 and I paid $84.98 for a "Kingston FURY Beast 64GB (2x32GB) 3200MHz DDR4" listing and now the equivalent on eBay "Buy It Now" is $374.99 for "Kingston FURY Renegade 64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 RAM 3200MHz (KF432C16RBK2/64)". What a timeline it has become for consumer computing three years later!

thijson

Price should send a signal to manufacturers to build more capacity. I wonder if they will though, it takes quite a bit of time, and it's not certain that the demand will continue to exist once built.

tayo42

Take your ram budget, buy micron stock, wait a few days, sell it and buy ram lol

swiftcoder

I bought 64GB of DDR4 in December of '24. Best timing-the-market of my life.

alecsm

Same thing with storage. I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.

ajsnigrutin

"back in my time", a dialup and 32 megs(!) of ram was enough for most stuff, including internet browsing. I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc. Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore. edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.

Fnoord

250 EUR (that is with VAT for 2x16 GB DDR4 [1] seems like a fair price. [1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...

KronisLV

Crazy, the other day I looked in my local store order history and say that I bought G.SKILL RipJaws V F4-3600C18D-32GVK, a DDR4 32 GB 3600 MHz kit of two sticks. I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation. Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).

functionmouse

I'm playing the newest games on ddr3 with a 2080 and a 4790k. It's a simple life.

api

This is insane. Didn’t know how bad it got. I bought a mini PC a few years ago with 64 gigs in it for a home VM server for like $600 total. Looks like I’m keeping it a while. Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.

whizzter

My bet is that the prices will crash once OpenAI (and/or Antrophic) IPO's have happened. Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.

matheusmoreira

Crazy... I hope this is temporary. If this is the new normal, we're all going to be priced out of computers eventually.

snarfy

I am counting my blessings after updating my and my wife's gaming PCs right before all of this happened.

SirFatty

Not just AI, tariffs also affect price.