I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
I guess my 96GB of RAM from 3 years ago will still hold up for another decade.
I guess my ageing i5-8400, 16GB, GTX 1060 rig can keep hobbling along a while yet.
Although I was amused to see my Legion Go S actually has a more powerful CPU now.
Clearly the best advice is “Build your PC a year ago”
Not even. More like 3 months ago.
The pair of 2x16 DDR5 6000 TEAMGROUP I bought back in April was $90 from Amazon. According to pcpartpicker, pricing started trending upwards late September, which Newegg still had it at $89 (9/30/25; B&H @ $109). The same pair at B&H is currently $439 (12/21/25) and MemoryC is asking $596. It’s insane.
So do we expect the cost of gpu’s to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier
how do you think market socialism would solve this problem?
One of the commenters said:
“avoid building a PC right now” is advice I’ve been following since 2017
And honestly yeah. I guess at this point if you can afford it, just pull the plug whenever, it’s always some bullshit going on the PC Market anyway.
I built my PC in 2019 right at the end of the year and I thank the gods everyday. I’ve only done one CPU upgrade since and it’s still great for 1440p gaming. The whole tower minus monitor and what not was probably like $900 at the time
Same timing for me also. Still plays new games relatively well. Especially considering I have an ultra wide monitor
IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.
64GB of DDR3 RAM in a system of that era is straight nuts!
I got a good deal where it was cheaper than the 32gb I intended to have :D It’s DDR4 btw. So it might be worth the whole system soon (1000k for the whole computer in 2017)
Ah, completely forgot that Intel 6th gen introduced DDR4 - I would’ve sworn it was much more recent than that!
You’ve certainly gotten your money’s worth out of your system - that’s for sure!
I went from a 3570K, 16GB, GTX 670 -> GTX 1080 (later SLI’d), to my current rig:
5950X, 32GB, RTX 3090 -> RX 7900 XTX
Just before the Ethereum mining rush took off, and with the current pricing due to AI fuckery - I don’t think I’ll be switching up anytime soon.
Gratz! That seems like you got really good timing to upgrade and then hold on for a bit :)
Yeah, in hindsight it really landed at an opportune time.
It’s a crying shame how greedy companies like Nvidia & Micron have gotten from back-to-back runs on their products - it feel like it will take a generational downturn for them to pull their heads in, and return to the more modest profit margins of the past (which even then was around 30%, IIRC).
That’s actually pretty solid hardware lol get a grip
It still works fine most of the time with a 1080p Monitor :)
I play with less on 2k 120fps
DDR4 is serviceable to me.
Here’s some actual advice for PC builders - what do you actually want from your system? Nothing you say can be vague, you have to set up goals. That’s the entire important note of PC building is what you’re building it for and how long you want it to last for as in, how long until you’re wanting to build another?
Instructions unclear. Purchased a 5090, 9800X3D and 64gb DDR5 RAM for playing Terraria. Also, it has shiny lights.
I want:
- Multitasking speed
- Fast SSD storage for dev tasks, builds…etc
- Large SSD storage for games
- Memory to run multiple development environments, lots of research tabs, and not have to turn them off to go play a game for a couple hours
- A GPU capable of playing most games on decent settings on a 4k monitor (upscaling allowed)
So generally this means:
- mid-high end CPU
- mid GPU
- 64+ GB RAM
- 1x High Performance 1TB m.2 SSD as primary drive
- 1x w/e 2TB m.2 SSD for secondary
RAM prices makes this… Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it’s about 5 years old now, and it’s time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM…
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn’t actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn’t the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what’s eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I’d expect it to be pretty effective.
dev tasks, builds…etc
I don’t know how applicable it is to your use case, but there’s ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla’s sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven’t used it myself.
My predicament, personally, is that my computer is starting to feel slow to me but I’m on AM4 and ddr4. The good jumps in performance are to be had in moving to the newer generations, which means that buying ram cannot be avoided. The suboptimal move is to stay on this legacy platform and be satisfied with marginal gains while investing further into hardware that will become obsolete sooner
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
Don’t buy a DDR 5 mobo?
Yeah. I’m on a relatively old build with DDR4, but still a decent processor and GPU. So far gaming have not been an issue with whatever I’m throwing at it. Not much in the way of loading times, and no real problem with the size of it. Some less game-y stuff, like video transcoding and 3D renders, also fine. And while I can see those improving somewhat with DDR5, I’m not sure it’s the actual bottleneck. And gaming won’t be much better with it… I mean seriously, moving loading times from 3 seconds to 2? I don’t really care.
The real issue will be when things starts to break down, as hardware do over time. It’s not that I want to replace the hardware if there’s no pressure from the software side, but I will have to if RAM goes bad, or motherboard decide to not power up.
One thing I’ve run into is not performance with old hardware but missing features from the CPU/GPU. Think of tpm 2.0 requirements for Windows 11. There’s other obscure instruction sets that newer games and programs require such as resizeable bar if you want to run a local llm.
My PC currently experiences a memory overload if I play ~150mods Skyrim for more than 2 hours straight. I currently have 16gb DDR4, Gtx1660 Nvidia. My thoughts are that the graphics card is the weak link but those are still too big a ticket.
Sadly it may actually be your ram. I had a 1660 until a couple months ago and the card kept up fine, at least for older games. With 16gb of memory though my system kept bottlenecking. Upgrading to 32 was like a breath of fresh air
That’s exactly what I’m thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I’m not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I’m just miffed that I said I’d get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.
If it’s a leak in a mod and some pages just aren’t being accessed at all, then I’d think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don’t need all that much space to just store swap, and it’s vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal/dp/B0FY4CQRYF
I have no idea the degree to which “lots of cheap, fast swap” helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it’ll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.
If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it’ll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don’t expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn’t need to last forever.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
Playing it on a lean linux distro (or simply neutering Windows heavily) helps a ton. There’s tons of Windows stuff that just sits in the background for no reason.
There are also texture optimizers for Skyrim, and some other performance mods.
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they’ve already done the technical work).
I think there are already community tools for texture management and decompression.
And… I don’t know. There’s such a critical mass of mods now that it doesn’t seem worth breaking compatibility with them all once again?
The Skyrim mod scene is actually extremely messy; if you look at other bigs ones (like, say, Stardew Valley), there’s a lot more cohesiveness and performance consciousness among modders. Or Mass Effect, which is more consolidated amongst a few big modsz
So I think the Skyrim community could do a better job of creating an easier to set up, more performant out-of-the-box experience for players, even as jank as the game is. But the game just has a different culture around it, I think.
Funny enough, I’m actually running bazzite. That’s why i know there’s a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol
Well, just to rule it out, have you tried Windows? Like a neutered windows with defender disabled and such.
I’ve found that Linux can get rather fussy under high memory pressure. It works and doesn’t crash, but it also really bogs down anything high performance once the swapping begins.
It can also get fussy with Nvidia.
So I’m not saying Skyrim will run better on Windows, but it might be worth a shot.
I run CachyOS, yet I still keep Windows around for some other heavily modded games.
The best we can do is just wait when price will fall down after ai bubble will explode
The prices will never go down again. There is literally no reason for the companies to decrease the prices. There will be like a 50$ decrease and people would go “oh look it’s so cheap now!!1!!” and companies will keep making 3 times their profits.
Im going to get me a dual CPU thread riper server for $399 when the crash happens!
assuming they will come down, if they can even get people to buy at an inflated price they wont reduce it.
The ai bubble will never pop.
Safeguards have been removed from the market and too many rich people are balls deep. Markets will be manipulated and prices will continue to soar.
nah, it’s a casino. crash will come eventually, the complication is that both bulls and bears want the same thing in the end…higher those lines go up the more $ the people who know how much the underlying is actually worth can cash out.
a crash/correction is just someone cashing out and either not putting the $ back in or atleast actually putting thought behind how they put it back in. the real suckers are the ones buying into everything automatically no matter the price.
Thats how bubbles pop. Those safeguards dont prevent an infinite money glitch, they stop the entire system from crumbling in a mild headwind. People always think this time is different during the growth phase of the bubble.
Why do you need a computer? Here is the AI on your smartphone, enjoy!
“Do you guys not have phones?“
As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.
I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they’ve been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn’t even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.
12th-gen CPUs are safe.
Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.
I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).
EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.
EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD’s AM5-socket processors, they can’t use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.
I waited too long to buy a new PC. I thought the later, the better. And now this.
Well, Windows 10 support runs until October 2026.
The sirens of Linux call to you in the meantime.
Yes, 30 years ago.
Long time user, first time caller.
What… what does that mean?
S.u.S.E. Linux April 1995.
if you can’t switch to linux, upgrade windows to LTSC. massgrave.dev is your friend, they have installers and an activator, maybe it can even change the windows type without reinstall.
and then start planning your transition to linux. don’t overthink it, just what you need, and what files you need over there, especially before deleting windows. fedora kde edition is a good starter distro, you shouldn’t need to tinker it if you don’t want
Yeah, this will make RAM prices cheaper. For sure.
well, not the main topic, but no need to be hostile, the last sentence made me think this is another problem to you
Windows 10 ltsc?
I assume this:
The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.
Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.
If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11.
Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store.
“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.
So you can get one extra year, but you need to tie the PC’s Administrator account to a Microsoft account, and either need to pay a $30 subscription fee, spend their Microsoft Rewards points, or set the PC to sync to their cloud service.
The normal Windows 10. ESU in the European Economic Area (EEA).
I thought the later, the better
Well, usually that is true.
As a silver lining, you think this could stabilize GPU prices? Or at least CPU prices?
If there’s less RAM/SSDs to build PCs with, then people will buy fewer GPUs/CPUs for them.
GPU prices
Outside of maybe integrated GPUs, I doubt it, because they need their own memory and are constrained by the same bottleneck — DRAM.
Or at least CPU prices?
I’ve read one article arguing that CPU prices will likely drop during the RAM shortage.
I don’t know if that’s actually true — I think that depends very much on the ability of CPU manufacturers to economically scale down their production to match demand, and I don’t know to what degree that is possible. If they need to commit to a given amount of production in advance, then yeah, probably.
Go back a couple years, and DRAM manufacturers — who are currently making a ton of money due to the massive surge in demand from AI — were losing a ton of money, because they couldn’t inexpensively rapidly scale production up and down to match demand. I don’t know what the economics are like for CPUs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fear-dram-glut-stifling-micron-155958125.html
November 5, 2018
To be clear, the oversupply concerns that have plagued Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares for weeks now are completely valid. Micron stock has fallen as much as 40% just since June on this deteriorating dynamic.
In short, the world doesn’t need as many memory chips as Micron and rivals like Samsung (OTCMKTS:SSNLF) and SK Hynix are collectively making. The glut is forcing the price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) modules so low that it’s increasingly tougher to make a buck in the business.
We had a glut of DRAM as late as early this year:
https://evertiq.com/news/56996
Weak Demand and Inventory Backlogs
Both the DRAM and the NAND markets are still in a state of oversupply, with excess inventory leading to significant price declines through Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This is driven by multiple factors such as weak consumer demand.
Memory manufacturers ramped up production during previous periods of strong demand, but the market failed to meet these forecasts. This has resulted in inventory backlogs that now weigh on prices.
There’s high demand for both RAM and GPUs coming from datacenters. Us regular consumers are just a tiny blip on their radar.
GPUs also need memory. So they aren’t escaping this from a consumer POV. Not to mention how production capacity is still being sucked up data centres, but now for AI.
