625
Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices — 128GB of DDR5 now $3,399
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
625 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
87390 readers
3958 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And suddenly me "unjustifiably" buying 128gb of DDR5 was a good investment of money.
I have 64gb of DDR5 and all my family said I was being wasteful.
Yeah, I splurged on some hardware upgrades with great shame almost 2 years ago because I was preparing for the idiotic tariffs, expecting modest price increases.
I did not expect a 5x. So glad that I did it. It would no longer be an option.
I did not ever think PC prices would go as crazy as they are now.
but I thank my fucking asscheeks every day that I upgraded my CPU, GPU and RAM right before the shit hit the fan just by pure luck and coincidence.
I still wish I had a better GPU, I had to settle for the one I got cause finances.. but I sure as fuck aint getting anything better for a reasonable price at this rate.
My 7900xtx was a rollercoaster of emotions all the way till now, so I decided to buy nvidia even tho I don't support them as a company in the slightest (nor do I support amd at this point, considering they dipped in same AI bubble as soon as they had the chance).
So yeah, "I will just buy next top-tier gpu as soon as it arrives" was looking like this for past couple of years:
I'm rockin a 6700xt for my gpu :\
I really shouldnt complain, its a great card, it just doesnt have the horse power to chug through the bullshit lack of optimization in Unreal5 based games. especially ones that force some form of raytracing to be on with no toggle.
I kick myself every day for putting off replacing this 2017 build of mine.. My 1080 weeps.
I built a new PC around that time for the same reason. I am kicking myself for not getting more ram.
Same! I got 64 GB but wish I got 96 or 128 GB (it's a server).
I stupidly only got 32GB and figured I would get more later because I spent more to get a good GPU. 32GB is feeling pretty limiting at the moment, but I'll just have to deal with it given the current prices.
sell 64gb of it today and pay for your entire PC build, plus a new (used) car.
Only if you actually use that much. You almost certainly don’t.
I do.
I wish I had 192GB, to be honest.
What is the need of 192GB?
I often execute calculations on a cluster where I'll need some 500-1000 GB of ram. But I have 32 GB in my workstation and I never felt I needed more.
Everything I need to do I can do: I can be having many browser tabs open, several IDEs, compiling and have a game engine open at the same time.
Only times I fill the ram is when I stress test my software for ram usage, but that is to be expected.
Machine learning/data science stuff.
Local LLMs is half of it.
But that aside, I found myself working with huge files that swapped like crazy on my 32GB of RAM, or were completely infeasible to work with. Janky local experiments I wouldn’t want to run on a cloud instance billed by the minute.
128GB has been a godsend, but I could completely fill 192GB and still swap some if I had it.
But I found there are happy side effects to having so much disk cache, too. For instance, game modding/tinkering has sped up immensely over 32GB. So has hashing for transfers, or other scenarios where it’s useful to already have a file cached in RAM.
Fair, I guess I'd also want some ram if I did not have access to a compute cluster.
But to be fair, for what I do I don't really think you can fit that much ram on a consumer motherboard.
In machine learning I don't generally find memory to be the bottleneck, as long as the GPU can handle it.
But sure, opening huge files can be big trouble.
I can rent cloud stuff, but it's just not worth it for casual/experimental use.
Like keeping Deepseek V4 loaded and hitting it rarely, but I want it to be in my control... it's just easier to do it locally.
Or experiments I launch like 30 times before it works. I'd waste hours moving all my stuff to a cloud instance, configuring it, tinkering with the experiment to get it to launch; the thing would be idle the vast majority of the time. And yeah, I know I can containerize stuff, but some projects I can't even test without a sizable memory pool.
Same. But more than that - I noticed that my 7700x is a huge bottleneck: desktop CPUs limited to just 2 channels, plus controller in 7700 is kinda meh, so I can't force anything above 5600mt\s with my 4 sticks. Switching to new CPU should allow to increase speed, but will still lock me to 2 channels. So I should've bought cheapest threadripper instead, which allows 4 or 8 channels instead.
Depends what you are going for. 7000/9000 series have way more per-thread performance than threadripper.
Another quirk with single CCD 7000 chips (which I have as well) is that the infinity fabric limits effective bandwidth to the CPU cores. Even with two channels, you hit diminishing returns with higher speeds, especially if you aren't using the IGP.
You can get around it overclocking the IF, but it gets complicated and its much easier to do with 9000 series CPUs.
introducing: zram
toss 32 or 64gb at that and call it a day
YMMV.
Big ZRAM absolutely tanks performance for me because it "steals" space that could be used for normal memory.
But if its for squirrling away a bunch of idle processes when multitasking like crazy, yeah, it can be wonderful. Just depends.
If you're able to have swap, Zswap is supposed to be better.
Zram is intended for devices with no swap
...This appears to be amazing advice.
https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/
That's exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
ah fair enough, worst case scenario if they dont know what to do with that much ram (I would build a homelab) they could also have a ramdisk
I paid $350 for a similar kit back in October. Same kit selling at the same place is 4k...