I am infinitely grateful to my past self that I purchased an on-sale 64GB RAM upgrade for my Framework 13 in 2024 before prices skyrocketed. It was $119, and checking back right now… Holy crap the same thing is $1,079 now.
Yeah, I put 96GB of DDR4 in a PC just before prices went wild and my only regret is that I didn’t also do my server. Garage sales have been interesting this summer. Always hoping to find old PCs or TiVo devices so I can grab the hard drives and/or ram.
yea its getting pretty bad. i bought 32gb 3200mhz ddr4 ram like 3 years ago for like 50 dollars brand new on amazon, and i recently had to purchase that same amount for a server pc im building and it costed like $130 USED
Bought my first prebuilt 2 years ago and it’s now worth over twice what I spent on it. First time in my life I remember anything like that happening.
It seems the more this shit happens the less I need tech in my life (pulls notebook out of back pocket and writes this down for posterity).
Ah you crazy kids, we used to have to lock our computers in steel cases in the early 2000s.
I got some 16gb of DDR4 i found in a closet. You guys can start bidding.
i’m using an optiplex sff with 32gb ddr4 as a monitor stand right now. i just don’t know what the hell to do with it… so it sits, probably until the dietpi running on a jaguar soc keels over.
What I’d do is a little media center / HTPC so my TVs stay dumb.
already have a media ‘server’ and several things to watch ‘tv’ on or from.
this is what we were doing with it… trying out winpodx, but it’s not quite ‘usable’ like this (updated after this, does same). so it (and it’s hp cousin with similar specs) sit waiting for their next call-to-arms.
I fucking had to keep pushing back buying some more RAM. Yeah, that was a great move. Now I can only hope the bubble bursts and prices crash.
I mean, I get by fine with the RAM I have. I don’t need much. It’s the principle of the thing, you know? Sometimes being financially responsible and careful sucks.
The thing with the bubble bursting is it will still take time for it to come down, as they’ll need to start manufacturering consumer RAM again. The stuff they’re churning out now can’t be thrown into a PC or laptop.
And they’ll NEVER allow prices to drop back to reasonable levels. They’ve already learned people will pay a premium during a shortage, so they can still artificially control the supply to keep prices high.
If competitors ever emerge making RAM at reasonable prices, we need to boycott the current fuckwads even when they undercut the new players.
I dont… I am absolutely stressing the DDR3 I have. But no way I am going to pay 500% for some memory!
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
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And suddenly me “unjustifiably” buying 128gb of DDR5 was a good investment of money.
Yeah, I splurged on some hardware upgrades with great shame almost 2 years ago because I was preparing for the idiotic tariffs, expecting modest price increases.
I did not expect a 5x. So glad that I did it. It would no longer be an option.
I did not ever think PC prices would go as crazy as they are now.
but I thank my fucking asscheeks every day that I upgraded my CPU, GPU and RAM right before the shit hit the fan just by pure luck and coincidence.
I still wish I had a better GPU, I had to settle for the one I got cause finances… but I sure as fuck aint getting anything better for a reasonable price at this rate.
I still wish I had a better GPU
My 7900xtx was a rollercoaster of emotions all the way till now, so I decided to buy nvidia even tho I don’t support them as a company in the slightest (nor do I support amd at this point, considering they dipped in same AI bubble as soon as they had the chance).
So yeah, “I will just buy next top-tier gpu as soon as it arrives” was looking like this for past couple of years:
I’m rockin a 6700xt for my gpu :\
I really shouldnt complain, its a great card, it just doesnt have the horse power to chug through the bullshit lack of optimization in Unreal5 based games. especially ones that force some form of raytracing to be on with no toggle.
I kick myself every day for putting off replacing this 2017 build of mine… My 1080 weeps.
I built a new PC around that time for the same reason. I am kicking myself for not getting more ram.
Same! I got 64 GB but wish I got 96 or 128 GB (it’s a server).
I stupidly only got 32GB and figured I would get more later because I spent more to get a good GPU. 32GB is feeling pretty limiting at the moment, but I’ll just have to deal with it given the current prices.
sell 64gb of it today and pay for your entire PC build, plus a new (used) car.
Only if you actually use that much. You almost certainly don’t.
I do.
I wish I had 192GB, to be honest.
What is the need of 192GB?
I often execute calculations on a cluster where I’ll need some 500-1000 GB of ram. But I have 32 GB in my workstation and I never felt I needed more.
Everything I need to do I can do: I can be having many browser tabs open, several IDEs, compiling and have a game engine open at the same time.
Only times I fill the ram is when I stress test my software for ram usage, but that is to be expected.
Machine learning/data science stuff.
Local LLMs is half of it.
But that aside, I found myself working with huge files that swapped like crazy on my 32GB of RAM, or were completely infeasible to work with. Janky local experiments I wouldn’t want to run on a cloud instance billed by the minute.
128GB has been a godsend, but I could completely fill 192GB and still swap some if I had it.
But I found there are happy side effects to having so much disk cache, too. For instance, game modding/tinkering has sped up immensely over 32GB. So has hashing for transfers, or other scenarios where it’s useful to already have a file cached in RAM.
Fair, I guess I’d also want some ram if I did not have access to a compute cluster.
But to be fair, for what I do I don’t really think you can fit that much ram on a consumer motherboard.
In machine learning I don’t generally find memory to be the bottleneck, as long as the GPU can handle it.
But sure, opening huge files can be big trouble.
I can rent cloud stuff, but it’s just not worth it for casual/experimental use.
Like keeping Deepseek V4 loaded and hitting it rarely, but I want it to be in my control… it’s just easier to do it locally.
Or experiments I launch like 30 times before it works. I’d waste hours moving all my stuff to a cloud instance, configuring it, tinkering with the experiment to get it to launch; the thing would be idle the vast majority of the time. And yeah, I know I can containerize stuff, but some projects I can’t even test without a sizable memory pool.
Same. But more than that - I noticed that my 7700x is a huge bottleneck: desktop CPUs limited to just 2 channels, plus controller in 7700 is kinda meh, so I can’t force anything above 5600mt\s with my 4 sticks. Switching to new CPU should allow to increase speed, but will still lock me to 2 channels. So I should’ve bought cheapest threadripper instead, which allows 4 or 8 channels instead.
Depends what you are going for. 7000/9000 series have way more per-thread performance than threadripper.
Another quirk with single CCD 7000 chips (which I have as well) is that the infinity fabric limits effective bandwidth to the CPU cores. Even with two channels, you hit diminishing returns with higher speeds, especially if you aren’t using the IGP.
You can get around it overclocking the IF, but it gets complicated and its much easier to do with 9000 series CPUs.
introducing: zram
toss 32 or 64gb at that and call it a day
YMMV.
Big ZRAM absolutely tanks performance for me because it “steals” space that could be used for normal memory.
But if its for squirrling away a bunch of idle processes when multitasking like crazy, yeah, it can be wonderful. Just depends.
If you’re able to have swap, Zswap is supposed to be better.
Zram is intended for devices with no swap
…This appears to be amazing advice.
https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/
That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
ah fair enough, worst case scenario if they dont know what to do with that much ram (I would build a homelab) they could also have a ramdisk
I paid $350 for a similar kit back in October. Same kit selling at the same place is 4k…
Give it 10 years and civilians won’t be able to own PCs… We will be forced to the cloud computers. And by that time AI surveillance and profiling will already have its infrastructure built.
We need to figure out how to do our daily things with very few computing resources. Gaming and heavy workloads excepted, most things we do ought to be possible on 15 year old CPU’s and 2GB. All we need is efficiency and low expectations. Fuck em.
It was already possible to do that. Then Electron came in and developers thought it was better to just release stupid apps that take 4 GB of RAM each.
“Believe it or not, straight to jail”.
Yeah. We went to the moon with, like, 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB RAM.
Not even. The Intel 8008 didn’t even break 1MHz and that was a few years later.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
Very cool, thanks for the detail.
Aldrin deliliberately ran the approach radar which was not in the standard operating procedure
That’s maybe what was on the LEM. The total computing power including the mainframes “back home” was a wee bit more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91
(Also besides the fact that it was 200000+ gallons of kerosene that did the “going”)
That’s still about 1000x less raw CPU performance than the cheapest smartphone on the market, though.
(E.g. a Blu View 5 Pro, which is the cheapest Tracfone is listing as in stock, for $30. Its Helio G36 uses 4 Cortex A53 cores at 2200MHz and 4 at 1800 MHz, and between 1-2 instructions per clock, giving between 16000-32000 million instructions per second. The IBM ran at 16.6 million instructions per second, per that Wikipedia link.)
(Looking at Walmart turned up a TCL K33 5G for only $20, but it uses a Dimensity 6300 cpu which is actually a little more powerful.)
Which just shows we waste tremendous computing resources on trash.
Agreed.
This is the time for Permacomputing to shine.
And even gaming is possible with those specs: retro gaming and emulation, thousands of excellent games
If you take gaming out of the equation though I don’t really need any sort of computing power.
How did you write this? Are you a wizard?
Its already here. Most “regular” users already depend for most part of there digital life on subscription based cloud computing. Al lot of people don’t even own a PC anymore, only mobile devices.
I was there on the first wave of the cloud boom (2012-ish), it’s biggest pushers got really angry that we weren’t up to give up our computers for “sleek, slim, and elegant” devices that would make wires “obsolete” at least in the home, so we can finally live in a sci-fi movie. They literally wanted us to use “browser app” DAWs that would do it’s computing on the cloud, then they realized many of us would like to record music, run live effects, etc.
Do I want more memory or do I wait for two years…
I wait for two years. As long as the existing memory modules doesn’t break, Linux will continue to be happy with existing amount.
If you are on windows, good luck.
I built a PC for work (I’m going to take it with me when I leave) and I bought used adata ram (2x32gb) with a lifetime warranty on it. I immediately needed to send one of the sticks for warranty. I bought the initial set of ram in May, and yesterday I paid roughly the same for a used set of 2x16gb. The price of the 32gb sticks is prohibitively expensive now. I’m betting the price only goes up, just wish I would be at 128gb rather than 96gb.
We could have been so rich if we could have seen the future. Just buy tons of memory modules at low prices five years ago and sell them now. What a profit.
Its not like memory tech has changed so much either.
If you could see the future, buying nvda a few years ago would have done the trick.
I would just feel like such a piece of shit scalping though.
I wonder if the fed gov cares that entire sectors of the tech economy are being threatened by one (AI).
They might get interested if people start talking about Epstein again.
AI bubble will burst.
I mean, today I saw a chocolate company ad saying no AI was needed. For chocolate. Anti-AI in a chocolate ad.
If Sees Candy is getting in on AI hate to sell shit, obviously people are tired of this crap. The bubble will burst.
and if it doesn’t, let em have it. I’ll cancel my internet, and start overloading all other infrastructure with confusion from not knowing how to deal with humans and paper…
idgaf. I can’t and won’t be forced to comply to a subscription.
Does not mean prices will drop though.
They will have to when the artificial demand falls out.
I feel so justified for doubling down on Zen 3, and replacing my dead R9 5900X with an R9 5900XT lol
I’m getting worried, 'cause I’ve got the same. What killed yours?
Bad luck. I started getting random reboots, the reboots started happening more and more frequently. I tried a few kits of spare RAM I had laying around, reboots kept happening. I replaced the PSU with a brand new one because mine was a decade old, reboots persisted. I replaced the CPU on a whim (with an upgrade if it was fine), problem went away entirely, not a single reboot since.
That’s strange - I had some of the same symptoms and it ended up being a completely different thing - a dying (and then eventually completely dead) SSD (the Phison controller fiasco).
Other than that the CPU itself seems fine and it’s only shown very minor degradation over the 4-5 years I’ve had it - i.e. it used to boost up to 4975 or 4950 single core, now it only goes up to about 4900 (no PBO, no CO); and I’ve also had to fix the SoC voltage because of the memory - but I haven’t touched that in like 3 years, so not sure it’s even degradation.
Yeah I tried increasing voltage, decreasing voltage, resetting BIOS to default settings, etc. I tried everything you could think of but nothing helped.
I did see a post on reddit from someone else with the same MCE hardware errors in Linux that I was getting, with the same random rebooting, and their 5900X ended up dying too.
On the plus side, all the game companies are going to finally start optimizing games and quit pushing out more and more demanding shit. A big win for smaller devs and creative\fun game developers too. My steam deck and old PC gonna keep on winning.
What do you expect? Few will be able to afford to play their whizbang-5000 games. We already saw it play out with VR.
You might be right. But charging them $15 a month to stream their whizbang-5000 games is still an option. Especially for Microsoft and Sony. (And Amazon wants in on that too.)
Dingaling! They will rent it to you and it will have latency issues, but who cares money.
I will say technologically my trials of both Google Stadia and Xbox Live Play Anywhere were both impressive and ran well for single player and co-op games. But the idea of actually paying an ongoing fee to play my games? Fuck that.
People said this about movies too, don’t be too optimistic
Yeah, perhaps they’ll start bundling network play time with the game and we won’t have a choice aside from playing our existing games.
