Don’t worry, China is about to flood the market. Don’t buy RAM yet, wait for the prices to normalize first.
Don’t be too hopeful. China will first fill their demand
Definitely, but they also won’t miss the opportunity to become a major actor in the industry globally. Contrary to the US, they have in the past decade made a lot of moves to establish their influence globally.
Which will impact the demand world-wide, because China’s demand also takes from that either way.
Aug 2024, I purchased 32gb of RAM for $109. That same kit today would cost me $509. Sept 2025 I got a 250gb nvme for $33 that is now around $85. The inflation is real.
Not inflation, just artificial shortage
Ditto, thought 64 would’ve been overkill at that point…
The inflation is real.
109 USD in August 2024 is equivalent in buying power to $115.31 today. $33 from September 2025, adjusted for inflation, would be about $33.84 today.
This has absolutely nothing to do with inflation
The inflation of computer component costs, the topic of this post.
Fair enough, you could say the prices are “inflated”. There’s a big difference though between inflation as the devaluation of currency that’s been slowly happening “forever” and inflation in the sense of a guy selling shit simply racking up his prices and putting the surplus in his greedy little pockets. Of course you can choose to use the exact same word for both cases if you wish
It wasn’t the best word choice. I did say ‘the’ inflation to try and separate it a bit, but should have rephrased.
RAM has always gone through huge price cycles as long as I can remember. You buy when it is good value then don’t when it goes up. The industry always responded to high prices by building too much capacity so after a few years the prices all crashed.
This time it feels different. We don’t have the huge diversity of producers we once did. The 3 big remaining players clearly operate as something like a cartel. I doubt they are responding to current shortages with huge new fab investments.
Lots of PC part manufacturers and retailers aren’t going to make it through to the over side of this. I think it could lead to massive long term changes for the DIY market.
At least China is pushing to expand production capacity.
I quite like the idea of people just not engaging with this.
Can’t play the latest AAA because I can’t afford the equipment for it? No worries, there’s literally thousands of other games out there.
More realistically though, people will end up subbing to a streaming service, which is almost certainly what the companies would prefer.
This isn’t necessarily about games.
My mini PC only has 4GB of RAM because I thought I’d just buy it later, and “for now” if it just boots it’s fine.I’m mostly just concerned on what I’ll do if a piece of hardware dies or corrupts at this point.
Piracy and giving them nothing is the answer
RETURN TO THE OLD WAYS
This.
That’s what I do for new games now, fuck $100 for a linear single player game. I implore all studios to use Denuvo as it’s the best DRM on the market 😉
You can’t pirate ram though
Oh, have I got news for you…
zswap enters the chat
Though in fairness, it is free.
WAY AHEAD OF YOU MATEY
If you’ve got a PC built in the last few years you can play them anyway.
Mostly this affects people whose PCs are pretty old already :/ but like if you’ve got an AM4 build you can just upgrade your GPU and maybe CPU if necessary and keep your good ol’ DDR4. AM4 truly the GOAT of CPU sockets in terms of longevity.
This is so true.
My PC I built has parts from as far as 12 yrs ago and day to day tasks go very smoothly especially since I switched to Linux. I haven’t bought a newly released game from a big publisher since Borderlands 3 and that ran fine. Most recent indie games still run well too.
I’m currently planning on upgrading with used parts from 2020 ish not because I need to, but because I’d like to play some games from 2010-2020 in medium-to-high graphic settings and hopefully make it last another decade.
Chasing AAA highest setting has always been an expensive hobby, but not it’s straight up luxury that only those with a lot of disposable income or make a living off gaming can afford. And honestly that’s fine because there are just so many good games out there that don’t require the specs.
or maybe, just maybe… You could, are you ready for this idea…?
Play on medium settings !!!GASP!!! Or worse, play it at 1080!
1080 and 1440 is a pretty big difference. 1440 and 4k, not so much. Definitely agree that there’s a point with settings where you just don’t really notice the textires/reflections/etc. when you’re playing the game.
Idiot me bought a 4k laptop and be fucked if I’m not gonna use every single pixel on that screen (even if I can’t tell a difference between 1440 and 4k)
I have a 16gb rx6800… playing stardew valley lol
Stop Killing Games could play neatly into this, fingers crossed.
1gb of ram costs more than 1 hour of minimum wage
HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.
Who puts an HDD into a desktop computer in 2026? For a NAS I would understand, but putting an HDD in a desktop is very uncommon nowadays, even as a secondary drive
I didn’t say desktop. But, in any case, there are plenty of reasons someone might want extra storage in their desktop without shelling out for an SSD.
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.
They will have Chinese RAM by then, so yeah, its going to be the random made up Amazon/Temu Chinese brands.
AmzRamBar24
Which is the same thing as the GOODKINDSTICK that everyone says is really good, but only if you get the V3.65 from 2025, the new stuff is garbage.
And you have to be careful because their versioning is broken. Version 5 is older than 3.
The Xbox 1 says hi
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.
Devs just need to optimize their software. My i5 750 still works just fine with a 1060 and 16gb ram. Their’s thousand of great games to play, fuck the aaa.
Nah. Fuck AI companies causing the shortage. They should stop delaying the inevitable bubble crash and suffer real consequences.
I mean sure, fuck all those AI business. But the idea that we always need more powerful hardware is a consumerism illusion.
I agree but also this shit is also affecting people who may just need replacement part or in my case just need an SSD so I can see about converting my old PC into a nomad.
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.
Going back to the 90s when a few megabytes was hundreds of dollars.
That’d be great if software still had the same small footprint it had back then.
We added 4 megs to our 486 and it was $80 a meg so $320 for the upgrade. That was back when hard drives where a little over a dollar per meg.
Are you sure about hard drives at $1 per meg at that time?
It sounds way to cheap.Yes, you are probably right. I think I am thinking of when I built my Pentium 100 and it was $360 for a 360 meg hard drive.
Or 80s, where it was kilobytes.
I’m looking for 64 GB (4x16) DDR4-2400 SODIMM. It is going to run me like 350 bucks… For used modules.
Absolutely ridiculous.
I should see what Ii have laying around.
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.
2028? You’re quite the optimist.
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.
Damn this is a hot tip!
Have you tried speed holes? They make it go faster.
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.
Looks at my PC struggling with Rimworld and Paradox games
Those are CPU intensive, not gpu
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.
Can you even run Balatro without a 3090?!?
unfortunately even indie games often require at least midrange hardware, like dedicated graphics cards.
i had to refund peak because it doesn’t run well on my computer, which only has intel integrated graphics, even at the lowest graphical settings…
Yes and no. There has been a HUGE jump in integrated graphics over the last five years. I’m guessing your Intel CPU is older and not one of the newer ones with Arc cores.
Integrated will never compete with a discrete GPU, but for indy and midrange titles you can now do without most of the time if your target is casual gaming (1080p and below, 60fps and under). The biggest issue is AMD and Intel don’t do a very good job of showing which CPU models actually come with good GPU architectures as they often package older ones on budget models.
It’s true that there’s a lot of AAA slop out there, but my all time favorite games have all been AAA in their time. Cyberpunk can still push my PC to its limits to this day.
For people like me we live in depressing times, although technically there’s no current game I am interested in that is beyond my PC’s capabilities. Good thing past me thought 32GB is a good addition in the before times when it only cost as much as a fancy meal.
Really outside of indie games, all I use my PC for is emulating. Why care about new pc games when I can play every game ever made from 2600 to ps3 on my PC?
Emulation is about the only new tech to be excited about nowadays.
The moment emulation began embracing mod support, it became peak gaming. You can now play your favorite old games with randomizers to mix things up, higher resolution models and textures to make them look more modern, patches to disable obnoxious elements (goodbye, low health alarms and lengthy animations for basic world actions), and even entirely new content. Not to mention combining games so you need to swap between them to progress, so you can be playing Super Metroid and find a key item for your playthrough of A Link to the Past.
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.
That’s detailed! That’s good and there are also Chinese ramping up memory production (I wish EU did something as well), but sadly it’ll still take at least a year if not more. The interesting situation would arise if AI bubble bursts in a year leaving us with huge memory surplus. One can hope, right.
The memory surplus wouldn’t be immediate after the bubble pops; at least not for regular people. What they’re currently producing isn’t one-to-one compatible with desktop PCs - most of the secondhand stuff from decommissioned AI datacenters wouldn’t be usable outside of servers, and it’d take a while for the newly freed fabs to start churning out consumer-grade memory again, factories to install it on consumer chips, and for it to make its way to the market (mass shipping is much slower than people think). That delay would hit producers hard, possibly gumming up the works even further. Modern economics is not at all equipped for supply chain failures.
There’s a reason people are panicking about this bubble, and that’s not even going into the far more devastating stock market crash likely to happen when it pops. It’s a nightmare in both economic and technological terms, but a small group of people stand to make a ton of money from it so they’ve gutted the regulatory agencies that would have prevented things from getting this bad, or at least softened the blow.
Well, at least chuds will be happy that they can gatekeep their hobby, and that the only people with the same skin color of theirs are able to afford it. Maybe they even can finally get the high production “ironic” nazi games they always wanted.
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.
Next decade you’ll be running Linux on Windows Portal hacked to run Linux instead of a dumbed down Windows to rent PC from Azure.
Calm down Satan
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 like to go to the nearby shop and pay the guy to put one together for me. I don’t know nearly enough to keep up with the industry, so I’ll defer to expertise.
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.
Honestly I might go for that Costco deal just for the RAM.
it’s going to be have like the slowest frequency a DDR5 can have but at current prices, getting your hands on one is already good enough.
Yeah. I actually started building a PC just this week? The timing is horrid, but I felt like, is it actually going to get better? When does that happen in my life?
Anyway. The RAM I ended up with cost a significant fraction of the GPU. It’s all ballsed up. At least it isn’t covered in stupid LEDs. I bought the cheapest 32gb DDR5 I could find and still spent like £400. All I can say is that Outlook had better run so good that I don’t wonder what £400 of cocaine would have been like instead.
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.
What specs? I’m in the market for 32Gb of DDR4…
That’s so cheap there must be something wrong with them. /s
Wish I had known this, I just bought 16gb total of ddr4 2 weeks ago bc one stick started failing and spent over $150
What’s the speed on them? I made the mistake of not maxing my am4 build when things started going to shit.