I bought it for 82 EUR, before the whole ongoing situation.
Now the same spec costs upwards of 290 EUR, about 3.5x the original price and even on Amazon the best prices I can find are upwards of like 210 EUR (2.5x).
Looking at it from that frame, it seems reasonable.
I thought 128MB of SDRAM was a good deal at $100.
I also thought $479 for 32GB of DDR4 was nuts back in 2016/2017.
Usually these bottlenecks lead to a price crash later. Of course that’s also part of what fuels the bottleneck. Companies are afraid of over investing in production and being left with underwater capital later.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-02/sk-hynix-...
I have no idea why a weather forecast site needs tens of megabytes of resources, and gig+ of ram for my browser, since i get no more info from it, than i did back then. Same for chat programs (how is discord different than irc? and why does it need so much ram to do so? same for slack), mail clients, etc.
Maybe it's time to kick developers to start optimizing stuff a bit, since neither they nor the users can't afford "unlimited" ram anymore.
edit: i'm not saying we need to get back to literally 32 megs of ram, just to make developers performance test their stuff on a laptop that was on sale 3 years ago in their local supermarket, i.e. stuff their users use at home.
Boy do I ever regret that. Every time I compile some code and the VM I use goes OOM, I die a little bit inside knowing that less than 100 bucks or so would have fixed this if I just went for it.
This is the stupidest freaking timeline...
"Price tracking courtesy of PCPartPicker now reveals the cheapest 32GB DDR5 RAM you can buy is $375. Specifically, four XPOWER kits from Silicon Power will set you back $374.97 thanks to a promo code."
its paired to a 5950x so im sure it will be fine for a few more years
Can you elaborate? Leaded gasoline is estimated to have contributed to the deaths of like tens (hundreds?) of millions of people. Asbestos probably millions.
Why would high RAM prices be remembered alongside these events?
Like clockwork, people naturally want to have their cake and to eat it too, so there will be the incessant complaining about the externalities. Half the people lack the brainpower to see the good and bad are intrinsically linked, and the other half just like complaining.
But at least for now, both halves aren't pulling back (in fact it's increasing), and money, not complaining, steers the ship.
This is insane. We've built our apps and websites to require ungodly amounts of memory and now AI scrapes away said websites while pricing us out.
Fast apps and websites need to make a comeback.
It's impossible to avoid using AI multiple times a day, just because it's forced into every product under the sun.
That is NOT demand. None of those users WANT this.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
If the vendors decide that free (ad-supported) use is necessary to keep demand, we will be entering a new era of surveillance capitalism instead.
Claiming people want this is like claiming that people wanted WW2 because look we're all enjoying the tech that was developed during it!
Real AI is a geo-political threat, and will not be allowed to exist for the average person. So, enjoy your toy AI models, because that's all you're getting.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
I talk to my Uber driver whenever I'm visiting somewhere, and yes, some of them are actually excited about AI.
Spec-ing and buying servers has become quite the pain in the past year, at least at the relatively-small scale we operate at. It's "dynamic pricing" with most quotes being valid for 24 hours :(
> Quotes came back to about €200k for 48 x 96GB DDR5-5600 RDIMMs.
That's around EUR 40 per GB? That seems quite high compared to what consumer DDR5 RAM is selling for, though it being RDIMM may account for some of the difference.
Quotes are 7 days max, lead times fluctuating out months, and often now have language they can choose to not honor the quote for any reason due to price fluctuations.
When it comes to server RAM, I got quoted double a previous quote within the span of a week.
Buying servers is basically quote roulette now.
I had it all priced out, but a bunch of birthdays in my family were coming up and I felt like I shouldn't buy something for myself if it's really their time.
My old laptop will have to cut it for a while. :-)
Is supply actively constrained, or is this mostly in anticipation of future shortages? How much of this is a mix of panic buying and price gouging on bad news?
I care more about the secondhand market. Prices are nuts for old used gear, but that also tracks with patterns I've been seeing since roughly the pandemic where more and more secondhand sellers on the usual platforms setting pricing patterns are small businesses, not hobbyists.
It is hard to overstate the damage that the infinite money being poured into AI is doing to the wider economy. Anything involved in datacenters is going to experience shortages/price rises. A pre-existing problem is power transformers: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-power-transformer...
The impact on domestic electricity prices in a year just after high oil prices is not going to be popular either.
When I bought the same ECC DDR4 16gb ram stick in 2016 (when DDR4 was rather new) it cost $85 (cant remember if it was new or used)
- Altman, a.k.a. Dory from Finding Nemo and/or Dario, a.k.a. Carl from Jimmy Neutron.
I wanted to upgrade my SSD but prices are more than at the end of 2025. I refuse to pay 500 euro for a 4TB SSD. I rather go outside and play with my bike like when I was 5.
Right now the biggest threat to their IPO's is that people realize that local models are good enough for whatever they're peddling, what's the most important factor to even running good enough models? RAM since you want the models in memory to not be total slogs.
I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.
The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
Would be nice to be able to own property.
The 5700X3D has been the smarter pick back then, it fits to the current latent user hostility of AMD to focus on the more expensive processor.
[1] https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/1419292/corsair-vengeance-lp...
There certainly is lots and lots of potential.
Surely it is a more efficient use of DRAM to run inference on shared hardware with large batch sizes and more utilization.
Because what to do with power-consuming outdated hardware ? let's say 5 years from now ?
They will need new RAM.
I wonder.
they are not. Unless you are satisfied with plausible, but mostly garbage output.
For non-coding work, they are more than good enough. A lot of the ways my non-technical family members have interacted with AI would be perfectly served by using a local model.
After all, people were more than satisfied with the results from GPT 3. That has long since been surpassed by open weight models.
It will happen, but yeah it takes time and money
This is similar situation to housing market. Prices are going up and supply is being restricted by whatever means.
It will be a bit of Catch 22.
When I was trying to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 I got the same warning. It is the reason why I'm now happily running Xubuntu on the same machine.
I did end up installing a Windows 11 VM (VirtualBox) which works perfectly fine running as a guest under Xubuntu on a 4790k (screw you Microsoft). But I otherwise never want go back to Windows as a daily driver. The enshittification just got too much for me.
I’d even get a house with a garage or something just for that.
I'd say local models are fairly capable of even somewhat complex coding execution. For complex non-coding work (research, in-depth analysis, assembly of complex info-dense documents) I'd rather do it by hand than switch from Opus 4.7 to anything I could even theoretically run locally.
Punishing instead of supporting.
Using red tape as some kind of prophylactic is ridiculous. If the state doesn't have the monitoring in place, you have to just trust the company, which is naive if not negligent. If you do have the monitoring, why require the extremely expensive song & dance? To protect corporations from negligently wasting money?
Answer: because the song & dance is primarily about extracting concessions, like union labor or even cash (e.g. promises to pay to fix someone else's pollution, or contributions to various interest groups). The friction and expense involved in today's development review processes are many times more costly to all involved than the social benefit.
That's hopelessly naïve.
If you let them build the facility that can pollute, they're going to pollute.
And if you point to the pollution coming out and tell them "you have to stop," they're going to say "make us."
And if you point to the pollution already in the environment and tell them "you have to clean that up, because you put it there," they're going to say "prove it."
And they're going to tie the government up in court for years or decades, and then oh, whoops, somehow the entity that actually did all the polluting has no more money and can't do anything about it :-( Good thing they were only a subsidiary that all the profit and assets can be moved out of!
And the people who actually live there are suffering from preventable diseases and dying of cancer at rates 5x the national average.
How do I know all this? Because this has been industry's playbook for over a century.
But even so, how does the song & dance prevent any of that? It's not like, e.g., a battery manufacturer submits a plan admitting that they're gonna dump stuff.
It raises the stakes, Obviously they can still cheat but now it's a matter of criminal negligence not civil law.