Technology

Well...but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn't asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker's memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org's Wayback Engine.

First of all, here's a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that's $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it's probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it's come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that's $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.

That's what I was thinking: early COVID, and it's not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too...