DDR4 prices have nearly tripled in just two months

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SiteWhole7575@reddit

Same thing happened with DDR, then DDR2 when it moved on to DDR3. Not surprised in the least…

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TheSaifman@reddit

Hey this is how my company works also.

We keep increasing the price of our old products until no one wants it anymore. Surprisingly some people keep buying the old ones. Then it can be phased out when there's no demand.

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BlazinAzn38@reddit

Hey sometimes it’s cheaper to pay a 5X premium on an old part cost rather than have to cough up 100x on a new machine

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Blueberryburntpie@reddit

I’ve seen a Windows NT 3.0 computer still in use at my workplace. IDE hard drives and all of that.

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My first job out of college 7-8 years ago had two vital pieces of equipment. Both ran on windows 98. The risk of them losing uptime in order upgrade them while they were still functioning wasn’t worth the risk so it was basically “ride this until it dies then we’ll figure it out”

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quyksilver@reddit

My friend's optics lab uses a sensor that's hooked up to a windows XP laptop. They literally have a stack of old laptops there for when the current one breaks.

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Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Why did you even included "during the dotcom bubble" let alone bold it? Just write the year 2000 if that's what you meant.

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eleven010@reddit

May I ask which highly regulated industry this is for? Perhaps medical or financial services?

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SiteWhole7575@reddit

I totally get that… I’ve paid some rather extortionate prices for “New Old Stock” of certain electronics until it came to the point where there wasn’t any left and it was finally time to upgrade my stuff.

When repairing is actually more expensive than just replacing everything it becomes a bit of a conundrum…

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AssCrackBanditHunter@reddit

This. Demand and supply dry up so those who need it have to pay a premium

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Pijany_Matematyk767@reddit

> rapidly widening the gap between DDR4 and DDR5 prices.

Wouldnt an increase in DDR4 prices make the gap between DDR4 and DDR5 pricing smaller, not larger? Or is DDR4 somehow more expensive than DDR5 now?

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TDYDave2@reddit

DDR5 prices are down to what DDR4 was selling 6-9 months ago while DDR4 prices have doubled, so yes DDR4 is now twice the price of DDR5.

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Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Meanwhile back in the real world.

64Gb DDR4 for £90

64GB DDR5 @ £151

No idea why people lie about so easily checked things.

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NetJnkie@reddit

Because the consumer market is much smaller than the B2B market. And has stock sitting there waiting. Go look at the enterprise market for RAM. I can barely quote DDR4 for “older” systems these days.

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shroddy@reddit

In Germany, DDR4 is still cheaper by quite a bit.

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TDYDave2@reddit

It is much cheaper here in Thailand now than in the US.
Back in October when I did my upgrade, it was cheaper to order from the US.

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krilltucky@reddit

in South Africa, 2x16 DDR5 is nearly double 2x16 DDR4 and that's not even the cheapest DDR4 3200 vs the cheapest ddr5 4800.

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Tiflotin@reddit

It's over 10 years old. Wouldn't surprise me if we see ddr6 in a year or two if they keep up the previous lifecycles.

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grumble11@reddit

DDR6 is coming early next year, will spend a year in datacenter and then the year following will come to client, so expect sometime in 2027. It looks like quite an upgrade from DDR5 with lower latency, integrated error checking and significantly higher eventual bandwidth. It looks to also possibly perform better at low voltages.

CPU performance will improve, but it won't be drastic as they don't generally use the bandwidth of the existing DDR. It will be impacted more by latency, and it's possible that improved latency (this one's more speculative, latency figures are pretty up in the air) can help with CPUs. DDR6 is also potentially the rise of CAMM2 to attach it to the motherboard, which is an improved system.

Where I think it'll help a lot will be with APUs or iGPUs which are currently very bandwidth and latency constrained which limits their performance. Strix Halo is the most powerful x86 one and had to implement a lot of custom cache and a fancy memory controller to get there. The M-series uses a very fancy memory controller and on package memory to do the same.

DDR6 APU solutions, will potentially really compete the XX50 series discrete chips. It may compete with the XX60 series as well, though you start running into issues around the cost of the APU and so on. Higher end chips like the XX70 series are likely to remain dedicated due to the cost and the difficulty of putting a huge APU chip together, though you never know.

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Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Desktop market is going to get really weird with AI focused CPU's needing soldered RAM.

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grumble11@reddit

They can use CAMM2 do get something ‘close enough’ to probably make soldered ram not needed for a lot of applications. Combine with DDR6 and you’ll likely be okay.

Frankly I think and heavy AI will still be cloud based. It’s just too computationally intensive in my opinion

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Randommaggy@reddit

All my DDR4 machines have as much memory as they can fit already.

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Plank_With_A_Nail_In@reddit

Lol at the replies say "Yeah I already got all of 1/4 or 1/2 of what is supported".

AM4 can fir 128GB not 32 or 64.

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Randommaggy@reddit

My ITX machine can run at most 64GB, my hot spare laptop can run 40GB at most (32GB Sodimm+ 8 GB Soldered).

Depending on your usecase 64GB can very well be the max you can reasonably use due to worse timing and frequency when running with interleaved channels.

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Capable-Silver-7436@reddit

yeah the wife and i got 32GB in our gaming rigs. by the time we need more even the 5800x3d we got wont be good enough so we'll be upgrading to probably am6 o rsomething then

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Thrashy@reddit

Same -- I've got 64GB of fast Samsung B-die in my desktop and 128GB of less pricey stuff in my VM host. I'm good for as long as I hold on to either system.

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CrzyJek@reddit

You will more than likely see DDR6 with the AM6 platform.

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Matthijsvdweerd@reddit

AMD said AM5 is supported till atleast 2027. If AMD decides to launch AM6 directly after, that means that the cycle continues.

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mokkat@reddit

I decided to stay on AM4. Got a 5700X3D while the price was low and the 2x16gb 3600mhz kit was 35€.

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BrightCandle@reddit

The stopping of production of DDR4 feels a bit premature to me. We have very recently had releases of CPUs for AM4 and there are a lot of small computers that are utilising it. In the past the transitions have been relatively rapid once prices on the new technology stabilised. I think things are a bit different now due to the general lack of progress in performance we see due to reduced rate of silicon process improvements.

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Concillian@reddit

As someone that works for a company that makes computer hardware, unless it's a "gaming" company, what happens at the 'you and me consumer' level doesn't matter AT ALL. The people buying memory at Newegg or Amazon is likely in the noise... a fraction of a percent of their DRAM sales. All that matters is what is happening B2B demand.

So if you want to know why this is happening, you have to ask what the DDR4 demand is for phones, servers, laptops, and random other stuff that has RAM in it like routers, 'smart devices', etc... When that demand falls off sharply, then the retail prices need to increase, because they were previously subsidized by the large volume of B2B sales that brought efficiency of scale.

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TheBraveGallade@reddit

Its probably the suppliers realising that if they switch to ddr5 they'll make more money

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Sadukar09@reddit

Its probably the suppliers realising that if they switch to ddr5 they'll make more money

DDR4: gottem

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imaginary_num6er@reddit

AM4 VEGA drivers were already EOL by AMD the same quarter as AMD selling new APUs or laptop chips with them. AMD does not care whether you can actually use the chips that they are dumping

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Rockmandash12@reddit

The Chinese market started dumping DDR4 at the end of last year so all the bigger players are getting out of the market. It's way too soon though, there's a lot of people and industries that haven't made the switch to DDR5 yet.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/chinese-ddr4-producers-are-undercutting-south-korean-rivals-pricing-by-50-percent

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DerpSenpai@reddit

Chinese competitors ran them out of the market

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Zanerax@reddit

And then immediately backed out of the DDR4 market themselves

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REV2939@reddit

Then prices would still be down due to said suppliers filling the void. But no, this happens when all generations eventually reach the sunset of their life cycle, just as we saw with DDR3, DDR2, DDR, SDRAM, etc.

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p90rushb@reddit

I just bought AM4 yesterday. Need new guts for the living room TV computer and didn't want to spend a lot. The 2x16 DDR was bottom-of-the-barrel Silicon Power brand at $50. Been several years since I had a DDR4 purchase so I can't tell if that is good or bad. Seems cheap to me?

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pmth@reddit

Yeah that’s about right, seems like retail prices haven’t actually been affected. There might be enough stock still out there that between that and the used market, prices won’t rise at all.

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Saneless@reddit

Just checked some ram I bought for 47 and 85 last month. 75 and 99 now.

Finally buying stuff because you think it might be expensive later paid off

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ColdAngle1151@reddit

Not seen any bump in prices on the used market. Quite the opposite when it comes to ECC ram at least.

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dynamitejim@reddit

64GB kit I got a month ago for $110 is now $135 on Amazon.

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blackbalt89@reddit

I talk a lot of shit about G.Skill because I have never had a kit last longer than 18 months but their lifetime warranty has already paid off with the 32GB kit they just replaced last month. :)

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MyHonestViews@reddit

I bought a 2x16gb 3600 CL18 for $62.99 just last week and today it's $88.99. This is Canadian pricing. Glad I got them before the sticker shock.

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estusflaskplus5@reddit

wow, i decided to buy a 2x32gb set 2 years ago on a whim. maybe it was a good call.

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chandleya@reddit

I’m sitting on 4x 32GB DDR4 SODIMMs. HODL

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Capable-Silver-7436@reddit

yeah they stopped making it and people looking for one last upgrade on the ddr4 platforms are grabbing it.

In a year or two it'll go down like ddr, ddr2, and ddr3 did at theri end.

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niknarcotic@reddit

Really glad I bought my 128GB kit in february lmao

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shroddy@reddit

Wake me up when DDR5 is cheaper than DDR4

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Aron_International@reddit

DDR4 production is completely stopping this year. Meanwhile the GOAT AMD are still supporting am4 with the release for the 5500x3d at the end of the summer. It's the perfect storm

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marx2k@reddit

Quite honestly, being into computers since the 80s... 16GB of memory for $24 is insanely low to me.

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bugleyman@reddit

I clearly remember $50 a MEGAbyte. 🙂

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Green0Photon@reddit

A 128GB kit I got to finally get my 5950x working on non buggy non mismatched 128GB jumped from $235 to $459. And it's just the classic Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200-C18, nothing fancy.

Holy shit.

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scardeal@reddit

Welp. There goes building a cheap AI box...

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Soulphie@reddit

the odd thing is you can get new ddr 4 at 3200 mhz 2x8gb for 22€, cheapest its ever been, the high prices havent hit germany yet

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nezeta@reddit

It seems that the DDR4 market has entirely been handed over to Taiwan's Nanya and some Chinese vendors. I expect we'll eventually see Chinese companies producing HBM for AI chips after building up capabilities in DDR production.

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shtoops@reddit

OEMs no longer use ddr4. No reason to keep production running.

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Ok-Fondant-6998@reddit

Ah, the DRAM cartel strikes again?
Oh wait, it's just DDR5 becoming the new standard, mixed with tariffs(China also makes RAM modules). AM5 released in 2022 so its been 24+ months so it makes sense why they'd slow down manufcaturing.
Hopefully the DDR4 price hike means they're finally shifting focus to DDR5, and those prices can start to drop for once.

Hopefully CAMM2 also sees an uptick in production. I want to see any of the major players adopt it, even in desktop. Like a mother board with 2 CAMM slots in front and 2 in the back for larger RAM capacity. Or 4 front 4 back if the manufacturing allows it.

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BlueSiriusStar@reddit

Feels like a conspiracy against CAMM2.

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TDYDave2@reddit

CAMM2 will likely not be common until the next gen chipsets from Intel/AMD are release with support for DDR6.

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SunnyCloudyRainy@reddit

It is CXMT doing some of the most unfathomable business decisions imo

Entering a market nearing EOL, driving other players in the market out with low prices to the point it can be considered dumping, and stopping the production because "it is not profitable"

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reallynotnick@reddit

I figured this was coming so I ended up buying a used 32GB 4000Mhz kit for $50 a couple months ago, that way I never have to worry aboutRAM again until I upgrade my CPU.

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billythygoat@reddit

cool, I just bought some ddr4 32gb used like a month and half ago so I can sell my 16 gb used now haha

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privaterbok@reddit

Nice time to sell used D4 and upgrade to D5

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popop143@reddit

Tbf there are a ton of cheap used DDR4 kits, and RAM is one of the most resilient pc components. Like I sold my 4x8GB kit for half the price of a new kit last year when I "upgraded" to a 2x16GB kit instead.

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propagandhi45@reddit

1 dollar cheaper for the 16gb kit I bought a year ago.

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Rosso@reddit

Good thing I got my 32GBs for like 40 euros last year

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gnarlysnowleopard@reddit

same

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binge-worthy-gamer@reddit

Tripled would be a 300% increase, not 40%

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only_r3ad_the_titl3@reddit

Tripled -> 200% increase

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binge-worthy-gamer@reddit

Fixed

Still not 40%

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Shadow647@reddit

200% if we're being smartass over here :))

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defchris@reddit

40% in the last week, tripled in two months.

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got-trunks@reddit

Sad, I really don't need more RAM but enjoy having cheap options haha.

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