Best advice is grab an AM4 motherboard and go for DD4 ram. You wont notice a difference in performance for majority of games. DDR4 ram and AM4 cpu's are cheap.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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DDR4 RAM is presently cheaper than DDR5, but it has also increased dramatically in price recently.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
DDR4:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ed889201-f9e6-46ec-81a8-832f6bfc63ed.jpeg
DDR5:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/35d03746-8d9c-443f-808f-8c88f2914b73.jpeg
Looks like I'm going to be stuck in 2023 for a long long time...
This, but 2015
Clearly the best advice is "Build your PC a year ago"
Not even. More like 3 months ago.
The pair of 2x16 DDR5 6000 TEAMGROUP I bought back in April was $90 from Amazon. According to pcpartpicker, pricing started trending upwards late September, which Newegg still had it at $89 (9/30/25; B&H @ $109). The same pair at B&H is currently $439 (12/21/25) and MemoryC is asking $596. It's insane.
Ya but video cards have been insane since covid too
Even before covid, when crypto was the big thing
I guess my ageing i5-8400, 16GB, GTX 1060 rig can keep hobbling along a while yet.
Although I was amused to see my Legion Go S actually has a more powerful CPU now.
Did some server maintenance yesterday, including driver updates. Broke my system since it updated my Nvidia driver to 590.x which no longer supports our little 1060s. Had to roll back the driver, thankfully easy. Suppose I better start keeping an eye out for some sort of upgrade...
Get Into books.
or play some (a)vn’s.
I guess my 96GB of RAM from 3 years ago will still hold up for another decade.
So do we expect the cost of gpu's to also rise due to this? Some money is opening up and next year I wanted to upgrade anyway. Might just need to buy it earlier
Yes GPU prices will rise too.
Top GPUs used to be like 600CAD. Then the covid thing happened and they've never come back down.
True! Luckily I'll always aim below the top of the line.
One of the commenters said:
"avoid building a PC right now" is advice I've been following since 2017
And honestly yeah. I guess at this point if you can afford it, just pull the plug whenever, it's always some bullshit going on the PC Market anyway.
I built my PC in 2019 right at the end of the year and I thank the gods everyday. I've only done one CPU upgrade since and it's still great for 1440p gaming. The whole tower minus monitor and what not was probably like $900 at the time
Same timing for me also. Still plays new games relatively well. Especially considering I have an ultra wide monitor
Don't consume any AI products. Don't consume any products made or marketed with AI products. Don't support any companies than invest in AI or are invested in because of AI. Lets kill this nonsense in 2026 and bring computing, jobs and wealth back into the hands of ordinary people. And a prememptive - NO BAILOUT for the tech bros when this shit crashes.
AI is mainly being aimed at B2B
Why? They are so old! Besides I always liked NSYNC better.
And isn't delivering there either
IMO, the pricing is an extortion scam rather than a real shortage. People are falling for it because of AI hype narrative. Best to wait it out.
They are manufacturing only 35% of consumer ram compared to what they were before? The supply is really going down?
It's by choice. Samsung did announce recently that they are going back to consumer ram production instead of trying to compete for low margin big contracts on current gen hbm. At half of current prices, ddr5 is more profitable than HBM even for hynix (leader).
64GB of DDR3 RAM in a system of that era is straight nuts!
I got a good deal where it was cheaper than the 32gb I intended to have :D It's DDR4 btw. So it might be worth the whole system soon (1000k for the whole computer in 2017)
Ah, completely forgot that Intel 6th gen introduced DDR4 - I would’ve sworn it was much more recent than that!
You’ve certainly gotten your money’s worth out of your system - that’s for sure!
I went from a 3570K, 16GB, GTX 670 -> GTX 1080 (later SLI’d), to my current rig:
5950X, 32GB, RTX 3090 -> RX 7900 XTX
Just before the Ethereum mining rush took off, and with the current pricing due to AI fuckery - I don’t think I’ll be switching up anytime soon.
Gratz! That seems like you got really good timing to upgrade and then hold on for a bit :)
Yeah, in hindsight it really landed at an opportune time.
It’s a crying shame how greedy companies like Nvidia & Micron have gotten from back-to-back runs on their products - it feel like it will take a generational downturn for them to pull their heads in, and return to the more modest profit margins of the past (which even then was around 30%, IIRC).
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The best we can do is just wait when price will fall down after ai bubble will explode
The prices will never go down again. There is literally no reason for the companies to decrease the prices. There will be like a 50$ decrease and people would go "oh look it's so cheap now!!1!!" and companies will keep making 3 times their profits.
Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.
I built a decent PC a couple years ago, and I don't need to upgrade often since I don't really care about cutting edge. So I kinda dodged a bullet, but, this sucks.
i built one literally in early November and prices were still normal, that was close haha
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DDR4 is serviceable to me.
Here's some actual advice for PC builders - what do you actually want from your system? Nothing you say can be vague, you have to set up goals. That's the entire important note of PC building is what you're building it for and how long you want it to last for as in, how long until you're wanting to build another?
Instructions unclear. Purchased a 5090, 9800X3D and 64gb DDR5 RAM for playing Terraria. Also, it has shiny lights.
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