Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it’ll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it’s just gonna get worse the longer I wait.
If they get better. By the time the AI sector collapses under the weight of its own bullshit, things will have already gotten significantly worse. You’ll be less worried about RAM prices and more worried about bread prices.
Don’t worry you might get $25 in a class action for bread price fixing. I think there should be a class action against the manufactures of Ram and hard drives. Most companies scale up when they have more demand, these fucks ain’t, theyre pulling a classic OPEC
I could crash the prices by tomorrow if I wanted to. All I’d have to do is buy some ram today.
I am figuring on selling off my previous machine once the teething issues with the new one has been resolved. Given these specs, what would be a fair price, Lemmings? I was guessing around $2,250 without the drives, but I am not really on the pulse of the market.
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CPU = Ryzen 5950x + Noctua heatsink with Kryosheet.
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PSU = SeaSonic Vertex GX-1200
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MOBO = Crosshair Hero VIII + WiFi
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CASE = Rosewill Thor V2
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RAM = DDR4 3600, 128gb total, came as a kit of 4 sticks.
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STORAGE (OPTIONAL) = x2 to x5 4tb SSD SATA drives, non-NVME.
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The biggest issue here is doing an RMA on the CPU. It is unstable when PBO is enabled. Since I suck at techno surgery, I wouldn’t be able to install the replacement without forking over money to a technician. Maybe I can make that contingent on buying at least 2 SSD SATA drives?
My new machine has only 4 SATA ports, and the SATA card to support all five SSDs and the optical disc drive is taking up a GPU slot. Being able to buy some 2280 M2 drives would solve that problem for me. That would gel nicely with a technician handling the transfer of the SATA SSDs back to the old machine for the new owner, since the tech can also get the M2 and a third GPU into my new PC.
I just bought a new pc with a top end Gigabyte MB, a 9950 X3D, Seasonic TX 1300, noctua cooler, PTM, and 48gb 6400 DDR5 for $2500, I would not pay 250 less for the extra DDR4 RAM and generally worse specs.
I’d re-look at current pricing and reassess.
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These price gouging assholes should probably be prosecuted along with the “AI” fraudsters.
Time to hit the books, explore the mountains, build a chicken shed, grow something in the garden, buy a plot of land and grow something… Build a house myself idk things like that.
Yep, definitely not buying any new computers any time soon. If anything breaks I’ll try to live with it as much as I can.
Fuck this pricing.
I got a framework some time ago, best decision ever. I can upgrade anything and everything on my laptop when I want, how I want, where I want.
That doesn’t make those components magically cheaper…
I can upgrade anything in my desktop too, but the 4x32gb ddr5 sticks I paid $200 for in 2024 now cost around $1,600.
Ow yeah 100%, just A case for reusability, repairability, and longevity. This might help users to extend the life of their computers, thus long term lower costs for the user itself when extending the life of the machine.
No reference to CXMT’s memory that’s just starting to be sold in western markets now, I’m very curious if/how that’ll affect things. If corsair’s cxmt kit can hold pricing steady, let alone drop it, for a 2x16 6000MHz CL36 kit then it could be huge
Yeah there’s a lot of doom here, but I keep saying that there are reasons that they are locking in 5 year price guarantees, it’s because they know it’s going to crash back down, whether it be bubble or normalization or Chinese. It’ll take some time, but it’s not forever.
I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
In case you are being serious, there are ways around faulty RAM sticks, usually just a few cells/rows are affected. In case anyone needs to know this, here is a pretty good summary on stackoverflow on how to deal with this on linux. In general, look for “memmap”.
Keep your hardware running as long as possible! Iirc newer RAM is unfortunately somewhat more susceptible to failing. My DDR3 is still working fine.
Recent leaks suggest that Sony will either have to sell its upcoming PlayStation 6 console at a minimum of $960 or push the launch date back into 2028 or even beyond that.
I seriously think that they should push it back to 2028.
I think that Valve’s making a mistake by not pushing back the Steam Machine to 2028 too, though at least for Valve, a hardware platform flopping isn’t a big deal, since they don’t rely on it alone to make sales.
Or maybe I’ll be wrong, and gamers will be significantly less price sensitive than they have been in the past. But my guess is that they aren’t gonna be jumping on consoles with a pricetag that’s that high. As I said before, the only console to be successful in the past that cost nearly that much in inflation-adjusted terms was the Atari 2600. Everything else failed.
Valve already bought CPUs, they were becoming more and more obsolete, that was pressuring them to release.
You may hate AI, but it’s not the reason we are seeing RAM costs skyrocket.
Looking at the manufacturing data and the historical strong-arm tactics used by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, who collectively control about 96% of the global DRAM market, AI just gives manufacturers the perfect public justification to stop chasing cheap bit growth, starve low-margin consumer channels (our RAM products), reprioritize wafers toward premium products (data center RAM), and force customers into multi-year contracts at shortage-era prices.
Sure it lets them make more money off us, but they really love locking in these rates with their data center-based customers.
And all this is just because … AI demand.
Rather thex grabbed a fancy reason to increase prices because of greed.
The few big ram production companies likely had a chat and decided: “Hey, more money? Yea! More money! We like more money!”
But of course they do, their shareholders wouldn’t like it otherwise. Capitalism 101. 🤷
It’ll be ok. Just stop buying shit. They haven’t needed new computers for years now they just act like they do. See windows 11 required hardware roll out. You think that is a new tactic? That is just them being overt about a practice that has existed forever.
The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I’ll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We’ll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.
Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun’s JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.
Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.
While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don’t think it’s far fetched.
And let’s not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)
Yann LeCun’s JASP
Wait, this is my first time reading about this. Got an ELI5 or TL;DR?
Courtesy of Kagi’s search AI:
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It appears there is a slight misunderstanding of the acronym: Yann LeCun’s architecture is called JEPA (Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture), not JASP.
JEPA differs from Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily in how they learn, what they predict, and how they represent the world. While LLMs are “word models” designed to generate sequences of tokens, JEPA is intended to create “world models” that understand the underlying physics and logic of reality 3 4 .
The key differences are summarized below:
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Generative vs. Predictive (Non-Generative)
LLMs are Generative: They operate by predicting the next token in a sequence (generative AI) 2 . This approach often leads to hallucinations because the model focuses on statistical probability rather than factual ground truth 6 . JEPA is Predictive: Instead of generating every single pixel or word, JEPA predicts latent representations (embeddings) in a hidden space 5 . It tries to learn what is “plausible” rather than attempting to reconstruct every single detail of the input.
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Word Models vs. World Models
LLMs are “Word Models”: They learn from text and treat intelligence as a language manipulation task 4 . LeCun argues that language captures only a small subset of human thinking and cannot represent high-dimensional physical spaces 2 7 . JEPA aims for “World Models”: It is designed to understand cause and effect, physics, and the physical environment 1 . This allows the system to reason from first principles and plan sequences of actions, which is a prerequisite for autonomous AI 1 .
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System 1 vs. System 2 Thinking
LLMs (System 1): LeCun describes LLMs as “System 1” processes—they are reactive and perform a fixed amount of computation to produce each token 2 . JEPA (Path to System 2): By incorporating world models, JEPA is intended to enable “System 2” thinking—the ability to plan, reason, and deliberate before acting 1 .
Summary Comparison Table Feature Large Language Models (LLMs) JEPA / World Models Core Goal Predict next token (Text/Code) Predict latent state (Reality/Physics) Method Generative (Pixel/Token by pixel/token) Joint Embedding (Non-generative) Domain Linguistic/Statistical patterns Physical/Causal understanding Weakness Hallucinations, lacks physical grounding Limited fluency in natural language Cognition Reactive (System 1) Planning/Reasoning (System 2)
Don’t fucking post chatbot vomit.
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8Gb of ddr4 is $25 usd and 16Gb ddr4 sticks are going for about $75 usd goes up from there depending on speed.
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/
This has new 2x8GB 3200 DDR4 DIMMs being a bit over $200 at the moment.
A year back, it was $50, but not now.
8Gb of ddr4 is $25
Ha! My 32g was $600, so 6x that.
I just bought a 32GB SODIMM DDR5 5600MHz for $430 😅 at least it was for a work PC
Type shit that happens to me when I earn my own money
The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.
The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.
To play devil’s advocate; it might be that the RAM producers see AI as a bubble, and it would be incredibly risky to expand their production now, when it won’t come into effect until a handful of years from now.
RAM and SSD manufacturers have already seen many many dips and rises in price over decades.
However, that all of them are deciding not to expand and potentially rake in the cash is more than a little sus.
I’m not sure how to feel about it personally. I hope the true cost of maintaining these AI models gets passed down to customers soon so that it either crashes and burn, or at the very least stabilises the market.
How long does it take a company already established in the sector to build a RAM factory?
Around 4 years. The creation of any microchip requires extremely stable geology, pristine rooms, high levels of training, Scrooge McDuck moneybins, and so on. It isn’t an industry that can turn on a dime.
4 years after they break ground. God knows how long to decide the location, bribe the authorities to get tax breaks…
