This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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
Damn this is a hot tip!
Make sure that they are red. That would make the PC become 3x faster.
Have you tried speed holes? They make it go faster.
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.
At this point, I will never buy Micron again even if they bring back their consumer RAM lines. I probably won't buy another Nvidia card as well. AMD has almost lost me as well. Might have to wait for Chinese GPUs.
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.
Depends on other things as well. It could be a decent deal but a pre built PC rarely is, even pre covid.
I like to go to the nearby shop and pay the guy to put one together for me. I don't know nearly enough to keep up with the industry, so I'll defer to expertise.
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.
Gaming is just going to become a hobby for the rich at this rate. There is no way we can keep up with this.
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.
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.
Well, at least chuds will be happy that they can gatekeep their hobby, and that the only people with the same skin color of theirs are able to afford it. Maybe they even can finally get the high production "ironic" nazi games they always wanted.
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.
That’s so cheap there must be something wrong with them. /s
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.
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
Not really, DDR4 has gone up 3-4x the price as well.
Used 8gb sticks are cheap on second hand markets, just get a motherboard with shitload of sots
I long for the day when we get to put up human chandeliers.
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.
I have 128GB of server ddr3 stashed away somewhere. I'm wondering if the first build since my am4 is going to be an older than that server just because I have the ram.
