“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
People buying RAM: oh no, what do we do?
People buying GPUs: first time?
What?
You think this is the first ram crunch?
It’s not even the first one in this decade…
Well, I was aware RAM prices fluctuate.
I’ve never been so unfortunate when buying larger RAM, or building a new system with a new DDR version.
They don’t real fluctuate, it’s more oscillating.
Sometimes it’s “normal” but due to a wide range of issues that can change quickly and stay that way for months because everyone waits till prices go down. So as they go down, people stop waiting,
Those are the same people.
Nice article but the numbers are a lot lower here in the EU.
While there is some pricing increase it’s currently more around 50% and not 100%.
The selected kit is also extremely expensive (350€ was ~300€) - similar kits are available for a lot less (270€ was ~180€) - so I doubt that anyone was buying it in the first place.
I also think it’s not completely AI related but more likely that this is another RAM price fixing scandal happening right now. Pretty much the same that we see today happend in 2017-2018.
Europe is also hit hard. The kit I was about to buy increased from 850 to 2K euro…
Bruh, my whole mid-to-high range gaming PC costs 850 to 2K euro. What is the intended use of such an expensive RAM kit? Is it LLMs again?
Scientific applications. My lab has a PC running 196GB RAM for processing 3D and 4D microscopy voxel datasets.
Assuming that you don’t need the absolute tightest timings and highest speed, you can get 192 GB from Corsair for “just” 660 euros where I live, pretty far still from 2000 euros. The speed and timings are the same as the 1300 euro kit, also from Corsair, it’s just that the cheaper kit has no RGB.
So at 2k EUR I’m assuming it’s going to be either more than 192 GB (in which case, is that even a desktop motherboard or are we talking about servers?) or some super high speed RAM.
256GB at 6000. In a desktop motherboard yes.
This kit. G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB F5-6000J3644D64GX4-TZ5NR
One of if not the only kit that can run with high capacity and at high speeds. In a “desktop” system
Sounds more like the applications require some serious optimizations to me…
Not LLM in this case actually. Virtualization mostly with qubes OS
Doesn’t Windows 11 in practice require even more memory than Windows 10 to operate with decent performance?
Meanwhile my Linux gaming PC seems to actually use less memory than back when it was a Windows machine.
My work laptop was upgraded to Windows 11 and performance has severely suffered.
As someone who usually uses 3 monitors (sometimes 4) and does GIS, it’s an issue.
Oh yeah. If you’ve got 4 GB ram, win 11 is going to absolutely skullfuck that machine.
Constant surveillance will do that. Legit “telemetry” wouldn’t be using that much processing power.
I’m thinking Recall is just Microsoft trying to cut costs on their servers processing all the surveillance, and force users to pay the costs of all the extra electricity and equipment needed.
Nah it’s probably just Edge (aka Chrome) all over the new UI.
That wouldn’t show in the task manager as telemetry.
I just got a 2x64GB 6000 kit before its price skyrocketed by like $130. I saw other kits going up, but had no clue I timed it so well.
…Also, why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM?
In actual server deployments, pretty much all inference work is done in VRAM (read: HBM/GDDR); they could get by with almost no system RAM. And honestly most businesses are too dumb to train anything that extensively. ASICs that would use, say, LPDDR are super rare, and stuff like Hybrid/IGP inference is the realm of a few random folks with homelabs… Like me.
I think ‘AI’ might be an overly broad term for general server buildout.
Same memory production capacity can be allocated to ddr5 or to hbm and openai signed contracts with sk hynix and samsung, the two largest ram manufacturers in the world, and bought a significant percentage of next year’s production.
DDR5 prices started spiking as that deals impact propagated through the supply chain. I bought a 2x32 6800 Cl30 kit for 195 euro 12 days ago. It was 330 euro 4 days later.
…Is it that interchangeable?
TBH I know little of memory fabs and HBM ICs, but I know (say) TSMC can’t just switch from a power-optimized process to a high frequency one at the drop of a hat.
Slightly different part, same process. The bigger bottleneck is packaging - HBM is 3d stacked.
Ah. Yeah. And its on the fab to do that.
I always though it’d be cool for CPUs to switch to packaged RAM, too. Samsung apparently tried to do it with Wide I/O for mobile ARM stuff, but it never caught on.
If I’m following what you mean by packaged RAM, Apple does that. It’s fast, but you can’t upgrade it.
That’s (as I understand it) a misconception.
Apple attaches their laptop RAM the same way all smartphones do. It’s a wide bus with LPDDR, which makes it an unusual configuration amongst laptops, but it’s technically conventional. And relatively cheap.
AMD’s Strix Halo chips are the same. Apple could use LPCAMM to make the memory upgradable if they wanted, they just… don’t.
When we talk ‘packaging’, we’re talking putting chips on advanced substrates with denser wires than one could possibly get on a motherboard (or a ‘mini’ motherboard which is kinda what Apple/smartphone RAM is packaged on), stuff silicon fabs have to do:
https://www.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/services/advanced-packaging
And HBM falls into this bucket. The way its hooked up to the processor is physically different than PC RAM sticks, or Apple’s RAM. This is mostly not done on consumer stuff because its very expensive, and most of TSMC’s advanced packaging production capacity is reserved for server stuff.
There was a recentish model, qwen next that was advertised as smth that can be run entirely on RAM.
They can ALL be run on RAM, theoretically. I bought 128GB so I can run GLM 4.5 with the experts offloaded to CPU, with a custom trellis/K quant mix; but this is a ‘personal use’ tinkerer setup basically no one but hobbyists will touch.
Qwen Next is good at that because its very low active parameter.
…But they aren’t actually deployed that way. They’re basically always deployed on cloud GPU boxes that serve dozens/hundreds of people at once, in parallel.
AFAIK the only major model actually developed for CPU inference is one of the esoteric Gemma releases, aimed at mobile. And the bitnet experiments, which aren’t very big so far.
(In case it’s not obvious, this is my special interest, and I’m happy to ramble on about how to set up ‘niche gaming rig hybrid models’ for anyone interested).
I for one would enjoy triggering your unskippable cutscenes in setting up local CPU based AI if it can work on Linux with an older amd card.
Don’t have funds for anything fancy, but would be interesting in playing around with it. Been wanting to get something like that setup for home assistant.
Plenty of folks do AMD. A popular homelabsetup is 32GB AMD MI50 GPUs, which are quite cheap on eBay. Even Intel is fine these days!
But what’s your setup, precisely? CPU, RAM, and GPU.
I have a MI50/7900xtx gaming/ai setup at homr which in i use for learning and to test out different models. Happy to answer questions
Looks like I’m running an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU, and 32GB RAM
4GB VRAM
Mmmmm… I would wait a few days, and try a GGUF quantization of Kimi Linear once its better supported: https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct
Otherwise you can mess with Qwen 3 VL now, in the native llama.cpp UI. But be aware that Qwen is pretty sycophantic like ChatGPT: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF/blob/main/Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Instruct-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf
If you’re interested, I can work out an optimal launch command. But to be blunt, with that setup, you’re kinda better off using free LLM APIs with a local chat UI.
Thanks for the info. I would like to run locally if possible, but I’m not opposed to using API and just limiting what I surface.
You can use Vulkan fairly easily as long as you have 8G vram
https://blog.linux-ng.de/2025/09/27/running-llms-with-llama-cpp-using-vulkan/
The key is which model, and how.
For the really sparse MoEs, you might be better off trying ik_llama.cpp, especially if you are targeting a ‘small’ quant. But the dense Gemma models (as good as they are) are probably not the best choice for 8G RAM these days.
Only got 4G vram, unfortunately
why does “AI” need so much CPU RAM
It doesn’t really, though CPU inference is possible/slow at 256+gb. The problem is that they are making HBM (AI) ram instead of ddr4/5.
First crypto miners came for my video cards, then AI came for my DIMMS…
Next tech-sector grift will probably go for our network adapters or some shit…
I’ve got a stack of old 14.4 modems I’ll sell them if they’ll grift on that for a bit.
next the tech-bros will come for you and there will be nobody left to speak up.
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The market can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent
The thing is, the “people” propping it up, are massive tech companies with collectively trillions of dollars to burn on this thing that is making their stock prices soar.
They have no incentive as the primary investors doing the circular buying to stop. The big problem here is the stock market provides awful incentives to everyone.
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This bubble is largely self dependent with all invested parties incentivised to prop it up. Completely different type of situation.
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No. The housing crash really started to go off when regular people could not pay their bills. These arent regular folks here. These are mega corporations.
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Are you like… just not reading the parts where I explain how these are massively different situations?
2 things can be bubbles while being massively different in the forces at play.
Just in time for all those windows PCs that MS is trying to force people to upgrade
Waiting for upcoming patch tuesday to see if mas scripts work
Wow I just checked the laptop kit I bought a month ago it is 50% more E: it’s fucking over 100% more now wow it was a 64gb sodimm kit I got for 280AUD and now it is 700AUD fucking hell
Old computer blew up, had to buy a new one. Nice 128gb ddr5. Just mobo, mem, cpu. Cpu is a rhyzen 9 9700
The memory was well over 40% of the cost, wtf?
Uhm what exactly do you need 128GB for? xD
Probably VMs.
not OP, but I guess that’s futureproofing, 128GB RAM should be more than enough for a long time
soon the bubble will burst and RAM will be so cheap! (I hope)
It always does. I remember buying my DDR4 RAM 200€, and two months later the same kit was 550€. Some month later it was back at 220€.
RAM used to cost 8x that. It’s the reason why HP cases have locks.
I don’t think the bubble bursting will slow AI that much, it’ll just be a round of hot potatoe over, the losers will lose their money and others will come in hoping to be profitable since they can skip a bunch of R&D costs.
AI is overhyped, but just like the internet after the dotcom bubble burst, it’s not going anywhere.
Plus I suspect that this time will be a dollar collapse rather than stock market collapse, which would mean prices would go up even more.
Buy one RAM and you get two GPUs thrown in for free!
Indeed awful. AFAIU, it is stockpiling HBM memory ahead of next generation “GPUs”, rather than existing product volume. I’m especially disgusted that prices in non-tariff countries are higher than in US. If this were to last, gddr5/6 computer ram would start to make sense. NVIDIA has been behind starving memory supplies for competing platforms (usually AMD) in the past.
This pricing is both huge inflation, but also huge drop in sales, because we have to wait for it to get sensible.
The non tariff nations getting hit with higher then us prices just shows how little they think of customers. They assume we will pay, they feel entitled to our money. The products have stagnanted, the prices are made up and clearly based on nothing but good old fashion “fuck you pay me” logic. My guess is they are assuming “AI” companies will just buy whatever they make.
If people keep buying however they will keep doing this. If the market drops out from them (AI bubble bursting at the same time people cut back on buying new systems) then they will likely ask for bailouts (your money again).
Apple specifically is provably charging countries without tariffs: https://iphone-worldwide.com/
Have the world subsidize US sales, just because they’re used to paying a little more. Not surprised that other goods would use same strategy.
Its just naked greed, the sooner the world can move away from america and these companies the better.
Laughs in ddr4…
It also got affected.
God fucking damnit, can’t I even be poor in peace, JFC!
Is DDR3 affected too?
Although it’s ambiguous how much of this is due to AI data centres and how much is the natural ramp-down of DDR4 production.
DDR3 also increased substantially in price a few years after DDR4 became available.
Im still gaming on a 15 year old cpu and ddr3, lol. Playing a decent amount of new games. Only one that wont run is alan wake 2 and that may be because of linux .
Amd fx 8 core.
Genuine question here, for a “normal” computer user, say somebody who :
- browses the Web
- listens to music, play videos, etc
- sometimes plays video games, even 2025 AAAs and already has a GPU relatively recent and midrange, say something from e.g. 2020
- even codes something of a normal size, let’s say up to Firefox size (which is huge)
… which task does require more than say 32Go?
You probably dont but 32gb ddr5 is minimum 200$ right now for the slowest.
For normal use like that 16GB is generally just fine. Some games can use enough that you’ll need to close Firefox and other RAM hungry programs though.
As far as needing more than that, people who do heavy design work or edit videos and that kind of thing generally do. For example 32GB running Fusion in Davinci Resolve can be a bit limiting sometimes with higher resolution or 10 bit footage.
If by normal you average, they don’t even really need 16gb.
Creative work can gobble up ram, heavy ass multitasking does as well.
So it’s more in the digitally productive professional or hobbyist cases where you need such amounts as a person.For development high amounts of rams can be useful for all sorts of stuff, it’s not just compiling, but also testing, though 32 is often enough.
I don’t know but I am constantly hitting the RAM limit with 16Gb of RAM with around 20-30 open tabs and other apps, both on Linux and Windows
Do you actually feel your computer slow down? I would guess your 20 unused tabs would get swapped out and the rest should run relatively fine
For a normal user, 16G is still enough.
But for a power user like me, a Dev, with multiple IDE open, multiple browsers, a database manager with a dockerized DB, I’m basically at 96-98% RAM all the time.
But even then, if you use a local AI, prepare to loose multiple Gigs to it.
I already used more than 30 Gigs on one LLM (dolphin-mixtral:8x7B for the curious), when I tried testing it, and a more reasonable Mistral:7B still took me like 4Gigs just to run.
I bought 16gb of ddr4 for 110eu back in 2018. Welcome back to the DDR wars, with NAND soon to follow.
Even ignoring the price hike, if you have to save for months to buy RAM, you should probably save it instead. Doesnt sound like a very smart financial decision to spend every last cent on your PC.
It could be just a kid doing odd jobs to upgrade their computer.
you sound like a guy i know who wanted to be a car mechanic but failed to qualify for the job on account of talking too much shit; but they hired him as a car sales instead with commission so his salary got 8x higher. of course he always gives financial advice now that he’s rich. for example, you shouldn’t buy a house near the city if you can’t afford one. you shouldn’t buy a car if you can’t afford one. and you shouldn’t buy a mobile phone and a subscription if you can’t afford it.
so if we break it down, his advice is: if you have a shitty job that pays you poorly; you don’t deserve to live in any kind of proximity to your shitty job, you should also have no means of transportation to said shitty job (because you now live far away from the city and would actually need a car to get to your job), nor any means of bank and digital ID access (to receive your shitty salary, because its priced outside of the bare minimum wage you’re forced to subsist on).
I bet it comes with a condescending “you really need to think things through” attached, too. I’ve ran into the type before.
naturally.
it’s the whole “if you can’t afford it, it isn’t for you.” attitude that pisses me off when society is literally turning into a place where just breathing costs you money. it’s such a common attitude among people well off as well. they all think themselves ‘deserving’ of their quality of life and anyone beneath it is simply not deserving. while they did absolutely nothing to get their position beside rolling dice.
another guy i know got his job through his dad who owned the business. he has been making very good income since day one out of school (and i mean, for this guy, and the other guy - they have no degrees because back then you didn’t need one to get good jobs); but after his dad retired 20 years ago they have slowly been tearing apart the job and making the conditions crap. so he actually quit a few months ago and now he is still making some 70% more than my salary on government welfare based on his previous salary and he has the gall to complain that he can’t figure out his economy. like bro, you’ve been giving me life lessons on money management and telling me i shouldn’t live outside of my means and now that you took a hit to your income but still have 70% more than me then suddenly the economy is too hard to manage? take your own damn advice for once and cut down on your frivolous expenses lol. like, do you really need to buy that camera part which costs 4 times your salary? is it vital? how often do you use the camera, once every 3 years? yeah i don’t see you bleeding mate.
Clearly people dont seem to like my take and its sort of expected. I also despise the whole “just dont by those avocados if you cant afford them” thing that rich people loving pushing. But damn if it takes “months” to save up 280$ then you are basically living paycheck to paycheck. I feel like i would prefer having an extra 280$ of emergency savings in that situation rather than slightly fancier RAM sticks.
Obviously lots of assumptions there. Could just be a kid saving up pocket money. Could be someone that earns plenty of money and just decides to only spend a very limited amount on hobbies.
You know the cool thing with RAM is that it’s modular and scalable…
So you can get a single 8GB or 16GB module for a few bucks to cover your basic needs and get another one or upgrade when the pricing situation improves.
Sort of, but you dont want to combine two sticks with different timings or frequency. So you gotta buy the high end ones straight away or be forced to remove the cheap one when you add better ones.
Yeah, and slots are limited. So if you get a 4x smaller sticks - i.e. 8+8+8+8 for 32Gb, and find you need 64gb+ then you need to pull out the existing sticks in order to make room for 4x16 or 2x32 etc
