this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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187
32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 minimum — AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] djdarren@piefed.social 12 points 50 minutes ago

I quite like the idea of people just not engaging with this.

Can't play the latest AAA because I can't afford the equipment for it? No worries, there's literally thousands of other games out there.

More realistically though, people will end up subbing to a streaming service, which is almost certainly what the companies would prefer.

[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 1 points 5 minutes ago

Also, AI kilt my dog and got my li'l sister prengate!

[–] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 15 points 2 hours ago

Upgraded my homelab with 256GB right before the prices went nuts. Lucky me.

But before I bought the best GPU at the time for absolute peak-price, adamant it would rise further and never going back.

So...universe equalized for me. For now.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

Going back to the 90s when a few megabytes was hundreds of dollars.

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 2 points 4 minutes ago

That'd be great if software still had the same small footprint it had back then.

[–] eleitl@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 minutes ago

Or 80s, where it was kilobytes.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 points 44 minutes ago

We added 4 megs to our 486 and it was $80 a meg so $320 for the upgrade. That was back when hard drives where a little over a dollar per meg.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

My CostCo is selling a gaming PC for $1,300, with 64gb of DDR5 and a RTX 5060. If that is a decent deal, go pick one up before the oil shocks start to really hit.

[–] Summzashi@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Depends on other things as well. It could be a decent deal but a pre built PC rarely is, even pre covid.

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 1 points 1 hour ago

I always go for a custom build myself. Got a Thor NAS chassis, I am just waiting for de-dollarization and the AI bubble to pop, so that I can use my Euros to build a top-shelf PC. Debating whether to pick up the motherboard now, since that is more unique component that can potentially stop being available. A Threadripper CPU and the RAM would be more generic.

[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 5 points 2 hours ago

I just had to buy a m.2 drive. It cost more than double the same item I bought in 2022. It also cost more than the entire computer it's being installed into! FML.

[–] popsalottacornsyrup@lemmy.world -2 points 29 minutes ago (3 children)

32GB for 375 seems pretty reasonable to me....32GB seems like an ass ton for enthusiasts.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 points 23 minutes ago

Are you kidding me? This time last year you could buy 32GB of DDR5 for under $100

[–] Pure_Psykosis@lemmy.ca 3 points 26 minutes ago

I paid $160 for the same last September.

[–] NOPper@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 19 minutes ago

I paid less than that for a very good 64GB less than 2 years ago.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

this sucks because I can function at 16 now but I have to juggle things more and I know I use less than the typical power user. I could survive at at 8 but it will be a massive pain.

[–] teyrnon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

So speaking of which, is there a way to clean out a C drive on a computer? I have a fairly new one I have barely used and somehow the C drive is full.

Idk the GBs but I suspect some kind of fuckery is involved.

[–] xvertigox@lemmy.world 2 points 29 minutes ago

I use Filelight on Linux and it looks like it's on win11 as well - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pfxcd722m2c

[–] Mihies@programming.dev 7 points 3 hours ago

Basically we will be buying computer parts in specific decades, like this decade is bad for anything memory, last was bad for anything GPU. Next will be bad for, I don't know, screens or mobos. And so on.

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 29 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

HDDs have doubled in price recently too. Not a good time to try building a computer.

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 15 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Building a computer like 5 years from now will be a weird experience because you will buy most parts from brands that you have never heard of. Very few of the manufacturers we know today will still be around by that time.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 points 22 minutes ago

They will have Chinese RAM by then, so yeah, its going to be the random made up Amazon/Temu Chinese brands.

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 9 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Much more than doubled. Most high-TB drives are not in stock anywhere, and even if you find a drive, the best deals are around $26-28/TB for used drives, whereas before new deals would be $10/TB. If you're looking for a specific new capacity, you may be paying $36-40/TB.

[–] BassTurd@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I've been putting 12tb used SAS drives in my Plex server. The used market went up about 30% from last year for the same drives. I think I paid $115 each before, now they're $150.

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I don't doubt you found a deal somewhere, but here's what I'm seeing:

$229 for 12TB used SAS: https://diskprices.com/?locale=us&condition=new%2Cused&capacity=12-12&disk_types=external_hdd%2Cexternal_hdd25%2Cinternal_hdd%2Cinternal_hdd25%2Cinternal_sshd%2Cinternal_sas%2Cexternal_ssd%2Cinternal_ssd%2Cm2_ssd%2Cm2_nvme%2Cu2

That's admittedly better than $26/TB, but I also had been looking at 20-24TB drives. That's the other change - the lowest-$/TB (highest value) TB size is has decreased substantially (from around 20-24 in late 2025, to 10-12 now).

[–] BassTurd@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

I bought 5 of these last September at $99 each https://ebay.us/m/x9d0kn. When I did some searching about a month ago, I found a couple for around $150 of the same model. So I paid less initially than I thought.

[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It's interesting, that's what I felt was happening, but when I looked at the charts, it seems they are less than double. Either way it feels really expensive.

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

I think it depends on the drive sizes, whether you accept used, and if we're comparing bare to shuckable, but yeah, for drives that I am looking for in the 20-26TB range (new, since I don't have enough parity/redundancy to trust used drives), it seems more like 2.5-4x cost.

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 7 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

I just don't think people are buying RAM/other PC parts period. new or used.

I've have a listing selling a couple year old sticks of 16gb (32gb total) of DDR4 ram for $120 for like 4 weeks now and not a peep from anyone. I've seen other listings for ram at similar price points that have also been up for weeks.

So i'm not sure if there's an actual shortage or people just simply aren't buying.

[–] ItsNotImportant24@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Wish I had known this, I just bought 16gb total of ddr4 2 weeks ago bc one stick started failing and spent over $150

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 2 points 3 hours ago

What's the speed on them? I made the mistake of not maxing my am4 build when things started going to shit.

[–] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

That’s so cheap there must be something wrong with them. /s

[–] tal@lemmy.today 18 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

As you can imagine, this is enormous pricing pressure for enthusiasts trying to build gaming PCs or upgrade their rigs in 2026.

Waiting until 2028 for anything involving RAM would be a good idea, if possible. You're likely to get more for your money.

If you've got money burning a hole in your pocket and are determined to spend on gaming computer hardware in 2026/2027, it might be a good idea to consider things like game controllers, displays, or something like that, since those don't have prices driven by memory price.

[–] BonsaiBoo@lemmy.world 13 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I’m really focusing on saving up for some stickers with flames on them, that’ll speed it up as much as I can afford for a while

[–] SabinStargem@lemmy.today 1 points 2 hours ago

Make sure that they are red. That would make the PC become 3x faster.

[–] fork@feddit.online 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I hate to break it to you, but...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

TL;DW - shit bad

[–] NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 11 points 3 hours ago

That is a worst case horror story that everyone should think about, and I'm not usually an optimist, but I don't think it's likely.

Ultimately AI is a hype wildfire, and it will eventually run out of fuel - signs are already showing that happening as AI hyperscalers and vendors are ending investments, restricting access and raising prices to recoup unsustainable losses.

At that point, I hope we stay sane and not jump at the first discounts, and just sit tight while prices return to normal. Prices need to fall heavily before we start supporting these AI-first companies again, or else we are going to lock ourselves into that AI-inflated price dystopia.

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.ca 12 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

Gaming is just going to become a hobby for the rich at this rate. There is no way we can keep up with this.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 hour ago

Really outside of indie games, all I use my PC for is emulating. Why care about new pc games when I can play every game ever made from 2600 to ps3 on my PC?

Emulation is about the only new tech to be excited about nowadays.

[–] Korkki@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (2 children)

Gaming is just going to become a hobby for the rich at this rate.

Well in global terms, PC gaming pretty much has been that since forever.

There is no way we can keep up with this.

Reject the AAA slop and you'll be good. It's not like anything good comes from them anyway and all their "innovation" is just fancier graphics and physics without any real gameplay, content or story, mainly to justify the overpriced next gen Nvidia card.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

Can you even run Balatro without a 3090?!?

[–] mintiefresh@piefed.ca 1 points 2 hours ago

This is all true.

I enjoy indie games mostly these days anyways and my game log is gigantic. I can hold out for a long long time.

Just depressing to watch these kinds of prices.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

So, two points.

First, new memory fabs start coming online in 2027, and there are more being constructed that will be coming online in subsequent years.

But, second...I think that some perspective is in order. Set new production aside. Let's imagine a world where that didn't happen. In fact, let's imagine that not a single additional memory chip was going to be produced. Video games were around when I played games on an Atari 2600, to pick an early video game console. I had fun with it. It didn't have the latest, real-time rendered photorealistic graphics. But...the Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of memory. Not gigabytes, not megabytes, not kilobytes. Bytes.

There are people building microcontrollers right now that have onboard memory, and those aren't impacted by this. It's just the high-density dedicated memory chips that go on DIMMs that are seeing all that demand.

According to Wikipedia, there were 30 million Atari 2600s made. The CPU I currently have in my desktop has a little over 145MB of onboard cache. Twenty-six of those CPUs, looking just at their onboard cache, no external memory from Micron/Samsung/SK Hynix, have more memory than all of the 30 million Atari 2600s ever manufactured, combined.

Like, don't get me wrong. I enjoy using all this memory that we have had available in recent years. But...video games are here to stay and would be even if no dedicated memory chips were around.

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[–] rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I guess I'll just stay on am4 until the bubble pops then. DDR4 has also gone up, but at least the prices are reasonable

[–] berty@feddit.org 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Not really, DDR4 has gone up 3-4x the price as well.

[–] ugjka@lemmy.ugjka.net 1 points 2 hours ago

Used 8gb sticks are cheap on second hand markets, just get a motherboard with shitload of sots

[–] lemmyng@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

I long for the day when we get to put up human chandeliers.

[–] mindwanderer@feddit.org 2 points 4 hours ago

so we will just have to settle for those chinese Mainboards with old intel server CPUs i guess. At least the DDR3 RAM for those is a bit cheaper.

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