DRAM spot prices doubled last week Spot prices for DRAM have doubled in the last week. Market watcher DRAMeXchange reports (regwalled) that the price for 16GB DDR4 3200 modules moved between $11 and $24 between June 24th and 30th, while some 8GB units moved in a band from $2.80 and $8.00. DDR5 16G 4800/5600 prices yo-yoed between $4.55 and $9.20, which is …
Winding down just means that, reducing the supply slightly (and probably shifting it to DDR5, hence the low prices there). It's inevitable, supply and demand won't track each other perfectly, and there will be big shifts in adjustment with each wind-down.
It's also slightly self-fulfilling prophecy - the shift of manufacturing efforts from DDR 4 to 5 will lower supply on DDR4, raising prices as a result, but equally will raise supply of DDR5 and lower those prices - as a result consumers will start shifting to DDR5. Again, changing the price dynamics and causing DDR4 production to take another ramp-down.
You're right, DDR5 probably isn't required for most users. But it will be if it's cheaper.
will need DDR4.
They normally ship with 8Gb but being fairly recently spec'd ex govt/business machines can benefit from more memory.
I just recently put 4x8Gb DDR in such an older small form factor box so that it can run a couple of Proxmox VMs. I don't think the price had increased any more than the currency fluctuations. Mainly finding the slower clock but lower CAS latency for that particular box was the main difficulty. 3200 CL22 was more common than the 2666 CL19 part.
I just checked with one of larger retailers sites (in AU) and looks like their entire stock of DDR4 parts has been grabbed in the panic. :) The smaller retailer whence I sourced my parts still has most items in stock. I might guess the PC refurbishers might have snaffled the DDR4 parts from the wholesalers.
Servers typically use larger ECC parts which are massively more costly than non ECC parts at least retail. I was fortunate when I purchased a refurbished Xeon workstation that I could double its ECC ram for a small fraction of new part's cost. (Presumably parts scavanged from defective workstations.)
He conveniently seems to forget that it is the people importing the kit that pay the tariff, not the exporting country.
His policies and especially the ones to remove every item that is made in china from everything made/.used in the USA is going to kill many companies stone dead. His 'component police' will inspect everything right down to resister/capacitor level. Many critical components are only made in China.
He (Trump) is blissfully unaware that all actions have an opposite reaction that will often hit you in the face badly.
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You're dignifying Trump by assuming he's even playing by those standards in the first place. It's not that he "forgets", it's that he didn't know or care enough to know that in the first place. For a sociopathic narcissist like him, it's correct because it came out of his own mouth, whether or not he knew what he was talking about. Anyone who disagrees with him is, by definition, wrong and the enemy.
He's both profoundly igorant, completely self-centred and utterly mediocre.
He's someone who was only able to spend his life indulging his narcissistic fantasy of being an idiot's stereotype of a big important "dealmaker" in the first place- and selling that image to others- because he inherited a shitload of money from his father.
In reality- despite having spent his entire life making countless alleged "deals" and despite a complete lack of the morality, ethics or empathy and willingness to screw anyone over- he's no better off than he would have been if he'd stuck daddy's money in a tracker fund. (This is why it pisses me of when the media panders to his own self-declared reputation and talks of him in terms of being a "dealmaker"- because he was never even good at *that* in the first place).
He's someone who never had to suffer the consequences of his own ignorance and incompetence and likely never will. So why the fuck would *he* need to care about that, even if everyone else suffers?
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To max out my laptop with 32 GB in May. The news about the DDR4 discontinuance had to break, it was because I was building a new desktop and while shopping for DDR5 for it decided to check on the price of 32 GB DDR4 SODIMM kits for the heck of it. Couldn't pass it up at $39!
I was shocked how cheap DDR4 was recently as well. I have been buying Crucial memory exclusively for probably 20 years now(before that bought Kingston ValueRAM), picked up a 32GB kit for ~$47 back in early Feb 2025 from B&H, my expectation was it was going to be at least $60-80 or more(I don't buy memory often). Looking now, that EXACT same part number(CR2K16G4DFRA) is now $119 on B&H. Had I seen the higher price at the time I still would of bought it since in the grand scheme of things it's not that much. Then I looked at the cost of the 64GB kit(2x32GB) and it is($108) actually cheaper than the 32GB kit(2x16GB), super weird.
The downside was one of the sticks was DOA, which was shocking too I've never had a DOA memory stick that I can think of on my personal gear going back 30 years(honestly made me worry quality is/has slipped...). Memory going bad even is super rare, but the computer wouldn't POST with this brand new memory stick(in either slot, meanwhile it's sibling, from the same package was fine in either slot). Did a bunch of troubleshooting and declared it dead.
Crucial happily exchanged it but it probably took 6-7 weeks to get a replacement, fortunately I was not in a rush. Ran memtest86 pro(which I didn't know was a thing till this same time as I had only used the free version before the pro version has some nice features though, but only works well on recent systems and only from writable boot media, so no ISO booting) on the chips for several passes and no issues since fortunately.
I do miss the cool "cooling" design of the Crucial Ballistix that I had on the computer prior (2x4GB) which looked like it was built like a tank, was disappointed to see that was apparently discontinued a while back.
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