Comment by Aurornis
18 hours ago
> Now it's listed at $4k...
You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com...
If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU.
If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgrade RAM in a year or two, 32GB kits are in the $370 range.
I don't like this RAM price spike either, but in the context of building a high-end system with a 16-core flagship CPU like this and probably an expensive GPU, it's still reasonable to build a system. If you must have 128GB of RAM it can be done with bundles like the one I linked above but I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months if you can. There are signs that prices are falling now that panic-buying has started to trail off.
128GB of RAM should not cost $4K even in this market.
$2800 is still a huge price in comparison with the last year.
Last summer, a 9950X3D + motherboard + cooler + 128 GB DRAM + VAT sales taxes was the equivalent of $1400 in Europe, where I live.
That's half of your quoted price. That was without case and PSU, but adding e.g. $200 for those would not change much.
In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow).
The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive.
On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock.
Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU.
Very similar config, but I bought a second pair of ram. Running 4 sticks at 3600. Also, the LAN port of the motherboard stopped working after a week, so I had to buy an Ethernet card
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Yes of course. We all know prices are up.
I commented because someone thought that $4K was the going price for 128GB of RAM, which is way too much even with the demand crunch.
Due to the high prices of DRAM and SSDs they now are the greatest fractions of the total price of a computer.
In January I was forced to upgrade an ancient Intel NUC, by replacing it with an Arrow Lake H based ASUS NUC. The complete system with 32 GB DRAM and 3 TB SSDs has cost EUR 1200, including VAT sales tax.
The distribution of the price was like this:
Since then, the prices of DDR5 and SSDs have continued to increase, so now the fraction spent for memory would be even higher than 59%.
Before 2026, for so small amounts of memory its cost would have been much less than the rest of the system.
I bought 192GB (4x 48GB) of DDR5-6400 for 299 euro in September but returned it because I couldn't get 4 DIMMS to run at decent speeds in the system.
6 or so weeks after I returned it the kit was listed at 1499.
Yeah the only way to run 4 sticks of DDR5 decently is with Intel. It's a bit of a shame that you can't cram enough RAM to run big models.
The most I could get running on 10GB VRAM + 96GB RAM was a REAP'd + quantized version of MiniMax-M2.5
Got it running with 4800MT/s and literally 30 minute boot times in an AM5 machine. The 30 minute boot time could be worked around by enabling the (off-by-default) memory context restore option in BIOS, but it really made me think something was broken and it wasn't until I found other people talking about 30 minute boot times that I stopped debugging and just let it sit for an eternity.
It's so bad. I don't get why they sell AM5 motherboards with 4 RAM slots.
At least that system has been running well for like two years. But had I known that the situation is so much more dire than with DDR4, I would've just gotten the same amount of RAM in two sticks rather than four.
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I’m running 128gb on a 9550x now with 4x32gb sticks and it’s terrible. It’s unstsable, post time is about 2 minutes (not exaggerating)and I’m stuck at a lower speed. I’m considering just taking 2 of the sticks out and working with 64gb and increasing my swap partition. The nvme drive is fast at least.
This is my first time off intel and I have to say I don’t understand the hype.
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I had the same issue with Intel. It's not guaranteed there either.
Threadripper is a good alternative. No point having a lot of dual channel ram for LLMs, too slow
No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.
Cheapest 64GB kit is $930.
The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks.
Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change.
> Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k.
That's not far from the bundle deal above, once you subtract the $700 CPU.
If you really need 128GB the 5600 kit is fine. Having 208MB of total cache on the CPU means the real world difference between a 5600 kit and a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases.
If you don't need to upgrade then clearly don't force an upgrade right now. I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now, even with the current situation.
> a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases
Does that “most use cases” caveat really apply to someone buying 128G of RAM? If I’m buying that much, it means I’m actually going to put it through its paces, unless it’s just there for huge reserved guest VM overhead.
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> I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now
Oh absolutely. Just mentioned it since I was very close to buying it back then, and now it's completely bonkers.
That bundle deal is quite well priced all things considered, it basically prices the memory where it was. Again, sadly no great bundle deals here.
that bs of you don't need 128 are toxic. what if you want to upgrade from ddr4 and you already have 128?