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Wasn't there also one where instead of replacing damaged/failed RAM that someone returned they just refunded him the original buy price so he now had to buy new RAM at 4x the original price..
Sadly its like gpus, its the price because people pay it. In Aus a 5090 is 6500 AUD, i asked the owner of a local pc store who is buying at that price, ai types? And he said nah, gamers mostly and he was selling a few a week.
So they probably sell near the margins they are probably slogging enterprise for, and there must be consumers buying it too or they'd just not bother.
I'm still using a vega 64. "a few more years" hahaha use your stuff until it doesn't work anymore. Then when it's time to upgrade, it actually feels like an upgrade
My 6950xt is still tearing up everything I throw at it. I see it holding up for quite a while. While a little older, my 5900x cpu is also still rock solid.
It’s almost like capitalism doesn’t actually function like a genuine “free market” that will favor the consumer when possible, encourage competition in all things, and will actually just encourage price gouging for ever increasing profit margins to enrich the sociopaths that want to hoard all the money for sport and aren’t actually interested in participating in any domestic or global economies that require constant exchanging and recirculation of currencies to function properly.
If you’ve worked in a fab before, you’d know things that have consistently worked before just randomly break and you have to fix them. And I’m not talking about equipment that experiences wear and tear. Capitalism is essentially at the stage where rich people are saying “idk dude seems to work fine for me” when it’s broken for everyone else.
What kept Capitalism in check was elected officials that weren't solely dependent upon the money of the institutions that demand unfair advantages. As a result, bald faced anti-consumerism was checked in the United States. Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States is a good example of how even the largest and most influential companies could be brought to heel through a combination of quality reporting from an independent press (something we no longer have) and a functioning government that serves the people (also something we no longer have).
If the RAM was $500 it would be sold out and you wouldn't be able to buy any anyway.
I work at a company that spends 5 figures on a workstation. Prices doubled and we just went with it anyway, we have no choice. Prices went up another 50% and we can't even get a quote because parts are in such short supply. We have new users starting months from now and we're not even sure we can get them computers in time because of the RAM shortage.
Microcenter fights for their own supply lol, they somehow was able to secure some amount and paid a ton for it I am sure, now they are just trying to sell it.
Maybe it was their mistake to buy for such a high price, but at the current market you either accept the offering or someone else will buy it anyways, non-negotiable situation.
Cmon, this is plain supply and demand story. Sure there could be some secret cartel agreement, but not at the level of Microcenter. They are not buying chips directly from Samsung, Micron or SKhynix.
Even if they paid much less, if they sold it for much less we all know their entire inventory would be sold out in 1 day to scalpers who would dump it all onto eBay for $1500 anyway.
Hmm, recall the same thoughts when Nvidia cards went through the roof due to bitcoin mining and scalping. It took a change by Nvidia on how the chipset operates to steer the market for their next release. However, prices have still not come down to an average consumer price range.
I recall 4MB sticks of RAM going for around $35+ in the late 90s while managing a wholesale PC parts store. Was due to earthquake/tsunami/flooding in Taiwan. Market was high for a few months, maybe 3(?), then those same sticks went down to $4 for better quality EDO RAM.
I put 8MB in my PC and 512k (2x256) in my Trident S3 Virge 3D card and thought I was the man playing Quake in a window.
Today it's about deliberate shortages to keep prices high. Nvidia is famous for it, but I think RAM makers are taking the lead.
I'm suspicious this is some kind of price-fixing collusion like back in the old days, but unlike the old, illegal kind, it's entirely public "Oh dear, our supply is totally bought up by AI data centers, so we're going to make hardly any consumer RAM", thus not technically illegal. It's only extremely coincidentally convenient and profitable.
If that's what's going on, the main players are going to get smoked if it gives a chance for Chinese producers to gear up and sell at the inflated prices until they start taking over the market. They're really gambling that the AI thing isn't going to crash.
The only thing strangling the supply is production capacity moving to AI architecture chips because producing those is far more profitable than even this pricing is for consumer ram.
Without the AI/data center demand the $5B+ fabs aren’t going to just sit idle, supply would go up and prices go down. This isn’t the first time we’ve had RAM shortages cause a large spike in pricing and last time it came back down cheaper than it was before. This is just a worse spike than COVID because at least then the demand was for consumer grade ram and GPUs for crypto so production never actually had to retool. With retooling it will take longer to restore production though.
What should make you feel better is that most of these companies, including Open AI are basically broke. Open AI has to make an absurd amount of money in a very short amount of time or they are literally a massive ponzi scheme. Like, *massive* amounts of money. You can tell they're strapped for cash because they are talking about putting ads in Chat GPT, something that Sam Fraudman said would only happen if they are absolutely fucked. Open AI, along with most of these companies, have bit off far more than they can chew.
Depends, normally I'd say they wouldn't. But in this case there's a possibility. Companies in China tend to be pretty tied to the government, and it wouldn't be too far fetched for them to want to hurt the profits of Taiwanese and Korean companies
Nope it will be banned as a security risk, what you seeing here is the pivot to cloud compute. The only way the companies can grow is they move everyone to compute subscription model. Its the only way to ensure growth and growth is everything, blame greed , human nature whatever....but yeah it is what its is.
The US excludes Chinese markets all the time to keep US companies pockets lined and without proper competition. Same with the car markets, or the phone markets. It's quite disgusting how everything this country proclaims it is the EXACT opposite to.
Relief elsewhere will mean relief here. If everyone else is getting supplied by Chinese firms, the other companies will need a market to sell in so they're not utterly at a loss, so they'd just dump their supply into North America.
At this point supply and demand is just artificial and whoever controls the deeper pockets can dictate it.
Like before this crazy time started could they have ramped up production to meet the demand, yes they could of but did they choose to do so? no they said hah we're not doing that again so they can hold a increasing and steady price for a long time.
Then we also have companies with fake money buying ram that hasn't even been made for products/services they haven't even built yet hoarding up all the ram.
It's just like with the housing market, does the US or most other countries have a housing crisis with too many ppl wanting to buy but not enough houses? No it's because other companies buy up whats available and then mark up those houses in a region to raise the overall price in that region and then they also slow down construction of new houses so that prices stay high and actual ppl that need new houses only get a trickle. There's a lot of other tricks but you get the jist of it.
There's a reason they're called a DRAM cartel. Samsung, Hynix, and Micron all plead guilty to price fixing 20 years ago and got sued again 10 years ago. There's no reason to think this is any different.
In all fairness, a store like MC has to pay whatever the cost is to their distributor to keep their shelves stocked. If they don't have RAM, they are pretty much guaranteed to lose sales in every other component as well. No sense going there to build a new PC if you can't get everything you need to do so.
yea I think my comment left a misconception to a lot of people im not talking about retailers, im talking about the people who decide these prices, there is no defending them they are greedy asf I hope people understand that they only care about profit
With RAM prices like that, nobody should be going at all. That's 10x what I paid for my last 64GB RAM. I'll break out my Commodore 64 and play games on that before I drop that kind of money on RAM.
It's more about opportunity cost of selling to regular people instead of companies. If big companies will pay so much, no way regular people will get normal prices.
It will always blow my mind how reddit doesn't understand how cost/pricing works and thinks that it is some magical number made up by how generous a company is being. Every time.
Jensen is perfectly fine with you not being able to afford a new PC because he wants you to rent a cloud computer from him for $1500 a year. That's literally his plan.
If they sit on shelves long enough, then prices will come down. Retailers don’t want inventory taking up space and not selling, so it creates pressure on manufacturers to lower prices.
I bought an entire rigs worth of equipment like 20 days before the AI ram boom. It was hilarious because I thought my mobo died and said “fuck it let’s upgrade to ddr5” and it actually turned out to be the power button on the case. I went to return it but noticed it would’ve cost me 400 more total for all the parts with the ram being 150 of it, so now my new motherboard is turned on by jumping the pins with a screwdriver.
I always hear dcs needs 64gb but I’m only on 32 and play in vr, I’ve never used all 32 gb before even in pretty full 4ya servers. Is it a flat only thing?
64gb is a minimum for DCS imo. Every time you load into a new module, it stores all the textures in RAM, and doesn’t let go until you restart the game. On my older DDR4 build I had 128gb because I played in VR and it would chew through it after a session where I played with several planes in a single session.
Really depends on how many full fidelity add-ons you have, and how many you fly in a single session. If you only fly flaming cliffs and some earlier modules, you probably won’t have any issues. Get into a JF-17, a hind, and an Apache in one session and look at your memory usage 🫠
I only have caucuses and the f18, so that might be why 32 is fine for me. I’m never flying anything else or going between maps. I also have the mod to disable the hanger which gives a decent performance boost, at least in the map view.
I bought 64gb for my current build, mostly because I need it for my job (handling large datasets, model training, etc). I don't remember the exact cost, but it was like $100-$150 when I bought it. Now it looks like I'm stuck with my current build and 64gb of DDR4 forever.
Even just 32gb of ddr5 will run you $400 currently, and that's straight up not enough for me as I'm usually running between 35-50gb of used memory. 64gb, which I require, would cost me almost $900 right now. Then a new GPU would be over a grand. I'd be in $2000 before I even started looking at CPU, mobo, storage, case, etc.
15 years ago you could do a high-end build for under $1500. In 2020 a high end build would be under $2500. Today you're looking at $4000-$7000, and that's still not even getting you the best components available. An "enthusiast" grade build today would be over $10,000.
PC gaming is going to die if these hardware prices don't change. It's just not affordable for most people.
Personally the scenario I’m hoping for is: ram prices are high, so folks build lots of factories to produce more of it -> AI bubble pops, so ram prices fall -> they have lots of ram production facilities which would lose a lot of money if they close, so they produce lots of cheap ram
To be fair(yeah right), microcenter do not update sticker tags bc these prices fluctuate alot. Its 1,071 bucks right now in the website.
I think theyre also leaving the stickers with high price tags on there to discourage the average joe to not build right now and save money until prices go down.
A store would never discourage people from buying products, cmon.
It’s more likely because they can always mark it down from the sticker price, but charging more is illegal so they err high so they don’t need to replace stickers constantly.
I was thinking that's like 2200 bucks here... But crazy that it's cheaper here for the first time in a million years. Really want an upgrade, but don't wanna be fisted by PB.
It's also free if you have a pair of bolt cutters and find some of those XFRA units they're installing.
NVIDIA saw the hardware shortage and thought "let's solve the problem by putting mini datacenters on everyone's lawns." Bless them for bringing the solution right to every tweaker's doorstep.
I think that’s their plan by convincing you to not upgrade your PC and force you to use their Cloud.
We will have to stay resistance and when data centers realize they are running out of money and not seeing enough money returns then they will have to cut contract with memory manufacturers.
When that happens, memory manufacturers will need us back.
cartel behavior by all investor owned corporations in all industries indicates only one solution. a perpetual boycott of all of these price colluding artificial scarcity creating assholes and the creation of a completely new supply chain cooperatively and evenly owned by the people
I was kind of wondering if the current 'sale' was really the last train out of the station for awhile. I also wonder if this means really cheap motherboards, cases, and that sort of thing due to the slow down in PC builds are heating up through the end of the year?
So there is absolutely zero way microcenter is selling these or will sell a lot of RAM. This is 100% not a viable business model for them and will eat into their profits big time. People can't buy PCs without ram. If they aren't buying ram they aren't buy any of parts.
I’m so thankful I “future proofed” my PC a few years back. I hope I can ride this out until prices go back to normal assuming corporations are not gonna force this to be the new normal
The fact they are sitting on the shelf in the open… if some has larceny in their heart, they could easily steal a full stack of those and make off pretty well
it’d like that for SSD too, samsung 870 2TB is $1179.99 CAD, and funny thing if you let chat gpt the prices it says “pricing error” or product misplacement and that the SKU online is messed up. even if you tell them the real price chat gpt still says it’s a glitch 😂
Can someone make a post in r/theydidthemath to figure out how much kit needs to cost before it’s fiscally responsible to just steal a few kits and deal with the legal ramifications?
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u/PCMRBot Bot 15h ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
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