alt Hacker NewsProbably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k...
Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years.
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I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane
I am glad I decisively ordered 96GB (2x48) DDR5 ECC back in June, alongside the 9800x3d.
I hope this is still enough for the planned upgrade to Zen7 in 2028.
After randomly breaking the AM4 CPU and motherboard in my 4 year old PC last year and seeing that at the time I'd spent almost a new PC to get new parts and rebuild it. Less if I wanted to do a complete rebuild myself but I'm over building PCs. I've done that for years.
It was an expensive mistake as I bought a few options to experiment including a NUC and an M4 Mac Mini but eventually bought a 9800X3D 5070Ti PC for <$2 and for no reason in particular I bought a 64GB DDR5-6000 kit for $200 in August or so. I checked recently and that kit is pushing $1000. I also bought a 4080 laptop and bought a 64GB kit and an extra SSD for it too last year.
That's pretty lucky given what's happened since. I don't claim any kind of foresight about what would happen.
I do kind of want to take the parts I have and build another AM4 PC. The 5900XT is not a bad option with 16 cores for ~$300 but my DDR4 RAM is almost useless because the best deals now are for combos of CPU + motherboard + RAM at steep discounts.
You can get some good deals on prebuilts still. Not as good as 6+ months ago but still not bad. Costco has a 5080 PC for $2300. There's no way I'm going overboard and building a 128GB+ PC right now.
I've seen multiple RAM spikes. We had one at the height of the crypto hysteria IIRC but this is significantly worse and is also impacting SSDs. I kinda wish I'd bought 1-2 4TB+ SSDs last year but oh well.
We're really waiting for the AI bubble to pop. Part of me think sthat'll be in the next year but it could stay irrational substantially longer than that.
> Now it's listed at $4k...
You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com...
If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU.
If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgrade RAM in a year or two, 32GB kits are in the $370 range.
I don't like this RAM price spike either, but in the context of building a high-end system with a 16-core flagship CPU like this and probably an expensive GPU, it's still reasonable to build a system. If you must have 128GB of RAM it can be done with bundles like the one I linked above but I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months if you can. There are signs that prices are falling now that panic-buying has started to trail off.
128GB of RAM should not cost $4K even in this market.