Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he\u2019s not working, you\u2019ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-13/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Hassam Nasir Social Links Navigation Contributing Writer Hassam Nasir is a die-hard hardware enthusiast with years of experience as a tech editor and writer, focusing on detailed CPU comparisons and general hardware news. When he’s not working, you’ll find him bending tubes for his ever-evolving custom water-loop gaming rig or benchmarking the latest CPUs and GPUs just for fun.
JarredWaltonGPU Let me rephrase that headline: The memory companies have increased the prices so much over the past few months that — in Germany! — they didn't need to tack on an additional increase this month. Probably because hardly anyone is willing to pay these stupidly high prices. Eventually, prices will have to come down. The only way to keep prices this high is if there's demand for it, and while the AI bubble will provide a lot of demand, you can't put standard DDR5 kits into servers. They need RDIMMs, so just refuse to pay server memory prices for consumer RAM kits. (I'm not planning on buying any RAM for the next year at least, possibly two or three years if things continue in the current trajectory.) TLDR: Don't buy DDR5 at current prices. Reply
pjmelect The prices have stabilised because hardly anyone is buying them at these prices, most people are waiting for the price to drop, I know I am. Reply
ejolson Are the actual memory chips used on the DIMM different between the buffered and unbuffered versions of DDR5? Reply
Shiznizzle As others have said. Capitalism is "working", no demand means the price has to come down. Retaielrs are seeign that nobody is buying anything so it is silly to raise them even more. The insane prices for M2 storage continues though. I am seeing some 1 tb stick on amazon priced at 170 pounds. Only an idiot or somebody really desperate would pay that. Let the retailers sit on their product. With prices like this, it is likely they are doing amazon a favor by going bankrupt. I wont need to buy any hardware at all now for at least 5 years as long as nothing breaks. If my Am5 system breaks i have the old Am4 system i can use which i kept and is more than capable of todays games and games for the next few years. I am one that can play without all the eye candy. Reply
JarredWaltonGPU ejolson said: Are the actual memory chips used on the DIMM different between the buffered and unbuffered versions of DDR5? No, but the buffered DIMMs include an additional chip and circuitry for the buffer. RDIMMs have a register (or buffer) between the DRAM modules and the memory controller, which stabilizes signal integrity. It allows for more DIMMs per channel, but does increase latency slightly, and most RDIMMs also support ECC (which IIRC requires an extra DRAM chip per eight chips to store the ECC values). So once the decision is made to create an RDIMM or UDIMM, you can't use that DIMM in the other type of system. Though in theory you could desolder the DRAM chips and reuse them on the other type of DIMM, in practice this is too costly to be worthwhile. Ultimately, if a company like Corsair (just an example — I don't even know if they make server RDIMMs) buys DRAM and makes a DDR5 UDIMM kit, then sells that to a distributor for $350, the distributor will need to sell it at more than $350, and then the retail outlet will need to increase the price yet again from there. Since Corsair in this case could have potentially created an RDIMM instead, it probably based the price of the UDIMM on what the equivalent RDIMM would have cost, leading to a situation where there are products in the consumer space that are simply too expensive for most consumers. Reply
vanadiel007 I have a scene from a movie in my head. 1 MILLION DOLLARS <insert evil laughing special effects> Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ddr5/ddr5-ram-begins-to-stabilize-in-germany-january-saw-only-a-0-1-percent-increase-in-pricing-across-the-month-some-kits-even-saw-price-cuts-as-volatility-begins-to-plateau#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- Flight Controls Are Cleared for Takeoff on GeForce NOW
- [Daily Due Diligence] NVDA NVDA
- Intel returns to boxed workstation CPUs with Xeon 600 — Granite Rapids WS delivers up to 86 cores, 4TB of memory, and 128 PCIe 5 lanes
- Purported Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs might bring extra performance with no price premium — early retailer listings show practically no price hike for some Core Ult
- GeForce NOW Brings GeForce RTX Gaming to Linux PCs
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.