Comment by Hamuko
4 hours ago
To be fair, DDR3 is still kinda cheap. It's really only DDR4 and DDR5 that are massively in demand. DDR3 is a bit too old for it to be in high demand by consumers.
4 hours ago
To be fair, DDR3 is still kinda cheap. It's really only DDR4 and DDR5 that are massively in demand. DDR3 is a bit too old for it to be in high demand by consumers.
Unbelievably, even DDR3 isn't spared. Our suppliers have been quoting us much higher prices for DDR3 for months now, and we're experiencing persistent stock shortages. Fabs are abandoning legacy nodes to prioritize AI capacity, making it rough even for maintaining old gear.
It isn't really unbelievable. Anyone who could sub in DDR4 for their projects would do so which increased the price. And then anyone who was still using DDR4 for projects would respond to the increased price by moving to cheaper DDR3 if they could. It wouldn't take much of an unexpected demand increase to move the needle since I don't believe much DDR3 or DDR4 is even being manufactured anymore. And then you have the supply side: Increased prices of upgrades will cause many of them to be delayed or cancelled denying the refurb/used market supply of the old hardware.
Personally I have a lot of DDR3 RDIMMS laying around that I got for cheap/free and have thought of getting a used workstation to put them in (4 channels of DDR3 will still net you ~60 GB/s of bandwidth) but the only Xeons that support it are Sandy/Ivy. Everything Haswell and newer with AVX2 and rebar/etc. use DDR4.
I wanted to buy another one and they are like $90 now :(
While DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.