RAM prices are ridiculous

The industry continues to feel the strain as AI data center demand drives up the cost of key components. Gamers, in particular, are facing soaring RAM prices as supply tightens.

Highlighting just how extreme the situation has become, a Michigan man recently posted on Reddit claiming that it’s now cheaper to buy an AR-15 rifle than 64GB of DDR5 RAM.

As the pressure to keep upgrading hardware continues, even for those who aren’t gamers, many consumers are questioning whether nearly $1,000 for 64GB of RAM is justifiable.

As one Redditor put it, “One lasts forever with proper care. The other is obsolete in a couple years.”

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https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1r9eykc/its_cheaper_to_buy_an_ar15_rifle_than_64gb_of
 
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Witness another lucky user receiving thousands of dollars' worth of RAM sticks. We are totally not jealous.

Redditor Hits the "Jackpot" As the Amazon Return Pallets Gave Him a Surprise of 40x 16 GB DDR5 RAM Sticks for Just $100​

We hope this doesn’t convince you to waste your money on Amazon return pallets, but this story might tempt some to try their luck. While we have been posting reports of users getting free hardware worth hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars, this is one of the craziest stories so far.

The user describes how he got insanely lucky after buying 25 KG of Amazon return pallets. He paid $4 per Kg, which means he paid a $100 for 25 KG return pallets.

Since Amazon return pallets can contain anything, including customer-returned, overstocked, or even unsold items, buying one largely comes down to luck, and not everyone walks away with a good deal. Some pallets may include defective or damaged products, which is why purchasing them often feels more like gambling.

That said, this Redditor was extremely lucky to find not one or two but a whopping 40 DDR5 RAM modules inside the pallets. Each RAM packet had a 16 GB Kingston Fury DDR5 module, which is currently selling for at least $175 on Amazon.

So, the total cost of the package is nearly $7000. We mostly see users getting an additional 3-4 RAM sticks or NVMe drives, but 40 RAM sticks really feels like using the entire year's luck.

The only time we saw someone get a lot of RAM sticks was yesterday, when a user paid $300 for a RAM kit, but received a box with 10 kits instead. We see such mistakes by Amazon occasionally, but nowadays, a lot of stories appear on Reddit as this is something considered a big luck these days.
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wccftech.com

User Buys $100 Worth Of Amazon Return Pallets, Receives 40 DDR5 RAM Sticks Worth $7000

Redditor buys 25 KG of Amazon return pallets for $100 and finds 40 Kingston Fury 16 GB DDR5 RAM sticks worth nearly $7000.
wccftech.com wccftech.com
 
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The New Memory Prices Quoted by Samsung & SK Hynix for Q2 Are So ‘Absurd’ That Buyers Might Find It Better to Give Up - wccftech​

DRAM Prices Have Almost Grown By 3 to 4 Times Since Q4 2025, And the Situation Is Worsening With Each Day

Samsung and SK hynix have reportedly started issuing contract prices for the upcoming quarters to customers, and the price increases are gigantic.

When we talk about DRAM contract prices, it is important to note that, given the memory market's shift to a 'seller-dominated' market, DRAM quotations are now revised quarterly for large-scale customers. For smaller buyers, prices change within days, making it almost impossible for them to procure supplies.

In the latest report by the Korean media outlet Sedaily, it is disclosed that memory suppliers are planning a major price hike for next quarter, and according to initial estimates, the overall price increase for this year (Q1-Q2) alone could reach 130%.

The report claims that larger buyers are ready to accept DRAM price hikes, given that they are already under extensive LTAs in which updated contract prices are reflected at the end of each contract. However, small- to medium-scale businesses dependent on memory supply face a major issue with rising memory prices.

Given that the volume they acquire is far lower than that of the likes of NVIDIA and Apple, suppliers like Samsung and SK hynix offer no leverage in the form of flexible pricing or volume, which means that for SMEs, acquiring DRAM has become almost impossible without raising end-product prices.

Based on what we have seen, DRAM prices alone have increased by more than 3 times since October 2025, mainly driven by the hyperscaler buildout and the memory supply squeeze, which buyers first noticed back then. In the coming months, we saw the consumer segment take a massive hit, with delayed product launches, lower inventory levels, and product price hikes.

And, in terms of when one could expect the situation to return to normal, industry estimates are pointing to a mid-2027 to 2028 timeline.
Click to expand...
wccftech.com

The New Memory Prices Quoted by Samsung & SK Hynix for Q2 Are So 'Absurd' That Buyers Might Find It Better to Give Up

Samsung and SK hynix have started issuing contract prices for the upcoming quarters to customers, and the price increases are gigantic.
wccftech.com wccftech.com
 
This is where our RAM is going
Lupus

Post in thread 'Keeping collections human under pressure'

ToxicBunny said:
Oh, no it was AI slop through and through.. and clearly approved by a marketing official with fsckall clue about language or anything of the sort. Lots of big lekker sounding words... therefore *Approved*
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yeah I was trying to make my replies as AI like as possible but even that felt harder.
Though I should just starting saying Approved-- or something like that.
 
Be careful when buying the absolute cheapest DDR5 you see. Early DDR5 sticks (4800MT/s) are significantly slower and have higher latency than the modern "sweet spot" (6000MT/s CL30). If you see a kit that looks like an insane steal, check the CAS Latency (CL)—if it’s CL40 or higher, it’s cheap for a reason.
 
Lawnchairman said:
Be careful when buying the absolute cheapest DDR5 you see. Early DDR5 sticks (4800MT/s) are significantly slower and have higher latency than the modern "sweet spot" (6000MT/s CL30). If you see a kit that looks like an insane steal, check the CAS Latency (CL)—if it’s CL40 or higher, it’s cheap for a reason.
Click to expand...

FYI, memory speed generally matters more than raw latency, but the context of the workload is important. Some tasks benefit more from higher bandwidth, while others respond slightly better to lower latency. In general, a faster memory kit with good latency will always perform better, but the real-world gains are often smaller than people expect.


The video below sums it up quite well. At current market prices, it usually isn’t worth spending an extra R4000 just to chase a ~5% performance increase. The price-to-performance curve flattens quickly once you move beyond mid-range DDR5 kits.



A CL40 kit running at 5600 MT/s or 6000 MT/s is perfectly adequate for most users. In gaming, the performance difference between a CL40 kit and a lower-latency kit (such as CL32 or CL30) is typically very small and often difficult to notice outside of benchmarks. In productivity workloads, the gap can be a little more visible, especially in memory-sensitive applications, but even there it’s rarely dramatic. Higher latency kits are not suddenly “bad” or unusable; they just sit slightly lower on the performance curve.

CL40 and higher kits are also cheaper because they generally aren’t using tightly binned memory chips. Higher-end kits with lower CAS latency are typically built from better-quality chips that can sustain tighter timings and higher frequencies, which increases manufacturing cost and ultimately the retail price.


So for most builds, especially budget or mid-range systems, a 5600–6000 CL40 kit hits a very sensible balance between cost and performance. Spending significantly more on lower latency RAM only makes sense if you’re chasing the last few percent of performance, running heavily memory-sensitive workloads, or building a high-end system where every small optimization matters.

So no CL 30 is not the sweet spot for average joe, the sweet spot in current market is 36-40 at 5600 - 6000, and if you have an AMD CPU with 3d v cache it matters even less.
 
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This was R1100 9 months ago
 
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