Comment by inferiorhuman
12 days ago
A blip in high end RAM prices
It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house
before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.
Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.
People that can reliably predict the future, especially when it comes to rising markets, are almost always billionaires. It is a skill so rare that it can literally make you the richest man on earth. Why should I trust your prediction of future markets that this pricing is the new standard, and will never go down? Line doesn’t always go up, even if it feels like it is right now, and all the tech media darlings are saying so.
If everything remains the same, RAM pricing will also. I have never once found a period in known history where everything stays the same, and I would be willing to bet 5 figures that at some point in the future I will be able to buy DDR5 or better ram for cheaper than today. I can point out that in the long run, prices for computing equipment have always fallen. I would trust that trend a lot more than a shortage a few months old changing the very nature of commodity markets. Mind you, I’m not the richest man on earth either, so my pattern matched opinion should be judged the same.
> B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
I didn't say I could build one from parts. Instead I said buy a mini pc, and then went and looked up the specs and price point to be sure.
The PC that I was talking about is here[https://a.co/d/6c8Udbp]. I live in Canada so translated the prices to USD. Remember that US stores are sometimes forced to hide a massive import tax in those parts prices. The rest of the world isn’t subject to that and pays less.
Edit: here’s an equivalent speced pc available in the US for $439 with a prime membership. So even with the cost of prime membership you can get a Ryzen 7 32gb 1tb for $455. https://www.amazon.com/BOSGAME-P3-Gigabit-Ethernet-Computer/...
Don’t forget that many of these manufacturers operate with long-term supply contracts for components like RAM, maintain existing inventory, or are selling systems that were produced some time ago. That helps explain why we are still seeing comparatively low prices at the moment.
If the current RAM supply crisis continues, it is very likely that these kinds of offers will disappear and that systems like this will become more expensive as well, not to mention all the other products that rely on DRAM components.
I also don’t believe RAM prices will drop again anytime soon, especially now that manufacturers have seen how high prices can go while demand still holds. Unlike something like graphics cards, RAM is not optional, it is a fundamental requirement for building any computer (or any device that contains one). People don’t buy it because they want to, but because they have to.
In the end, I suspect that some form of market-regulating mechanism may be required, potentially through government intervention. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see what would bring prices down again, unless Chinese manufacturers manage to produce DRAM at scale, at significantly lower cost, and effectively flood the market.
You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
> You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
Yes. Absolutely correct if you are talking about the short term. I was talking about the long term, and said that. If you are so certain would you take this bet: any odds, any amount that within 1 month I can buy 32gb of new retail DDR5 in the US for at least 10% less than the $384 you cited. (think very hard on why I might offer you infinite upside so confidently. It's not because I know where the price of RAM is going in the short term)
> So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
At this point I can't tell if you are arguing in bad faith, or just unfamiliar with how prime works. Just in case: You have cited the cost of prime for a full year. You can buy just a month of prime for a maximum price of $14.99 (that's how I got $455) if you have already used your free trial, and don't qualify for any discounts. Prime also allows cancellation within 14 days of signing up for a paid option, which is more than enough time to order a computer, and have it delivered, and cancel for a full refund.
So really, if you use a trial or ask for a refund for your prime fees the price is $439. So we have actually gotten the price a full 10% lower than I originally cited.
Edit: to eliminate any arguments about Prime in the price of the PC, here's an indentically speced mini PC for the same price from Newegg https://www.newegg.com/p/2SW-00BM-00002
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Add to that a case, PSU and monitor and you're realitically over $1000