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Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

Desktop memory has also increased in price. I think it’s twice as expensive for DDR5 than it was 6 months ago.

It's very noticeable:

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

I've just built a gaming PC (after more than a decade without one), for curiosity's sake I just compared the prices I paid for DDR5 2 months ago to now, and at my location it already shows a 25-30% increase. Bonkers...

Same, just checked and the "G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo Series 64GB (2 x 32GB)" RAM I bought 9 months ago for $208 is now $464. That's crazy!

I think that's nearly exactly what I paid for 2x32GB at a retail store last week. I hadn't bought RAM in over a decade so I didn't think anything of it. Wish my emergency PC replacement had occurred a year earlier!

Feast and famine industry, it’s very traditional

I got 96GB in June with a desktop upgrade, good timing and should be enough for a good while.

Yep, DDR5 prices have nearly doubled in less than 2 months. https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.5200....

Are those graphs specifically for the US? When I change the country in the top right, it doesn't seem like the graphs are changing, and considering they're in USD, I'm assuming it's US-only?

Is the same doubling happening world-wide or is this US-specific, I guess is my question?

Edit: one data point, I last bought 128GB of RAM in March 2024 for ~€536, similar ones right now costs ~€500, but maybe the time range is too long.

They are US-specific, yes. Thanks for asking that - I'll look into updating those graphs to show for the appropriate region/country depending on what country you've selected (on the top right of the page).

It just means RAMs aren't sold in volume in your area, if you're not feeling it...

[1]: https://kakaku.com/item/K0001448114/pricehistory/ (archive: https://archive.is/CHLs2)

I'm not finding any way of figuring out if that's true or not, I live near the second-largest city in Spain, kind of feel like people probably buy as much RAM here as elsewhere in the country/continent, but maybe that's incorrect. I've tried searching for graphs/statistics for the last 1-2 years about it in Spain but not having much success.

I can add Spain price trends to PCPartPicker. Quick question though - do you want the price trends to cover just Spanish retailers, or should it trend the prices across all of the EU?

That would be incredible! Personally I only buy the stuff I can find inside the country, inside the country. But then some stuff I have to order from Germany/France/Italy when it's only available outside our borders.

So I don't know the right approach here, I can see value for both price trends for multiple reasons, unfortunately :) Wish I could give a simpler answer!

Ok that should be in - if you view the price trend pages now there are different currency grouping options (with EUR being one of them). Hope this helps!

Not parent, but logically the EU is a single market, so EU-wide prices are better, IMO.

In the UK I was looking at DDR4-3200 SODIMM last week for some mini-pcs... and decided to pass after looking at the price graphs. It's spiked in the last few weeks.

What graph you used for UK-specific prices as it seems the earlier graphs referenced here are US-only?

camelcamelcamel is the best for amazon items - choose a stick, look at the graph.

There is a bit of annoyance as items come in and out of stock (ie. out of stock often means inaccurate price); so its often better to find a product on amazon and look here.

8GB SODIMM stick https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0C7Z4HJ8L?context=se...

regular 2x16GB pair https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07RW6Z692?context=se...

I have a script watching on some items on overclockers and crucial, including RAM. So for those by graph I really meant "eyeballed an email search".

Maybe it’s time to sell my unused DDR4s! I was thinking it’d be not worth anything at this point

536 € seems expensive for March 2024, but either way, the price dropped a lot over the last one and a half years, only to surge in the last two months.

> the price dropped a lot over the last one and a half years, only to surge in the last two months.

Yeah, that was my hunch, that something like that was going on. Thanks for clarifying.

I was able to get a bundle deal from Microcenter here in SoCal with the Ryzen 9950x, motherboard and 32GB of RAM for $699. They have since removed the RAM from all the bundles.

While thats a sweet upgrade for people with an older desktop that can support a motherboard swap, its worthwhile to point out the ram is probably insufficient.

RAM usage for a lot of workloads scales with core/thread count, and my general rule of thumb is that 1G/thread is not enough, and 2G/thread will mostly work, and 4G/thread is probably too much, but your disk cache will be happy. Also, the same applies to VMs, so if your hosting a VM and give it 16 threads, you probably want at least 16G for the VM. The 4G/thread then starts to look pretty reasonable.

Just building a lot of opensource projects with `make -j32` your going to be swapping if you only have 1G/thread. This rule then becomes super noticeable when your on a machine with 512G of ram, and 300+ threads, because your builds will OOM.

Ha, I was going to purchase a 96GB kit, but that's when I first noticed that RAM prices were getting crazy.

Even used memory has doubled in price. I was thinking of putting together a high-memory box for a side project, and reddit posts from a year ago all have memory at 1/2 to 1/3 of current ebay prices for the same part.

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