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RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders (arstechnica.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.

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[–] 69 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.

I built a decent PC a couple years ago, and I don't need to upgrade often since I don't really care about cutting edge. So I kinda dodged a bullet, but, this sucks.

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  • [–] 41 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Honestly the incentive to “upgrade” a gaming PC the past decade is really weak. Aside from a few AAA titles almost all games run just fine on old hardware. Particularly if you ditch Windows.

    So let’s just all refuse to buy this overpriced shit. The same price increases have already happened to GPUs and gamers felt like they “needed” to pay those prices still, nah fuck that, don’t give these greedy pigs a dime.

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  • [–] 28 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    I'm worried that they're trying to price us into not owning our machines anymore. You will own nothing and rent from us strategy.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Well, good news!

    Valve will bring GameBox upon us.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    The big unknown that's been a popular topic of discussion is whether Valve locked in a long-running contract for the hardware before the RAM price increases happened. If they did, then they can probably offer favorable prices, and they're probably sitting pretty. If not, then they won't.

    My guess is that they didn't, since:

    • They announced that they would hold off on announcing pricing due to still working on figuring out the hardware cost (which I suspect very likely includes the RAM situation).

    • I'd bet that they have a high degree of risk in the number of units that the Steam Machine 2.0 will sell. The Steam Deck was an unexpectedly large success. Steam Machine 1.0 kinda flopped. Steam Machine 2.0 could go down either route. They probably don't want to contract to have a ton of units built and then have huge oversupply. Even major PC vendors like Dell and Lenovo got blindsided and were unprepared, and I suspect that they're in a much less-risky position to commit to a given level of sales and doing long-running purchases than Valve is.

    I've even seen some articles propose that the radical increase in RAM prices might cause Steam Machine 2.0's release to be postponed, if Valve didn't have long-running contracts in place and doesn't think that it can succeed at a higher price point than they anticipated.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    What I see inside the headset after setting the game to 25% Render scale FSR Ultra Performance Lossless Scaling 5x framegen:

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Strangely enough even in 2017 the CPU was the Bottleneck for VR with strange micro stuttering in some games. But most played really well (Moss, Walking dead, Half Life Alyx, Holopoint, Beatsaber, Elite Dangerous etc.)

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Honestly, a system with 64GB of memory is pretty well-provisioned compared to a typical prebuilt computer system from a major vendor.

    I've felt that historically, PC vendors have always scrimped too far on RAM. In late 2025 with our RAM shortage, it'd be understandable, but in many prior years, it just looked like a false economy to me. Especially on systems with rotational drives

    the OS is going to use any excess RAM for caching, and that's usually a major performance gain if one has rotational drives sitting around.

    EDIT: And battery. At least in 2025, a lot of people are using SSD storage, and caching that in RAM isn't as huge a win as it is with rotational drives. But lithium batteries have gotten steadily cheaper over the years. The fact that smartphone, tablet, and laptop vendors aren't jamming a ton of battery in their devices in 2025 is kinda crazy to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I intended 32 GB DDR4 2400 but got a Deal for 64 GB DDR 4 2100 for 10 Euro cheaper. The whole system was only 1k to built myself and the only Upgrades I got was a NVME and SSD over the years. I got really lucky to have a Mainboard from that era with an NVME and USBC slot.

    But on the other Hand a AM4 Ryzen chipset would have been nice instead of the dark Age Intel Chipset without being able to Upgrade much....

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago*

    I hear you, you makes sense, but that way lies the death of personal general computing, which would be a crying shame. You'll have nothing and (won't) like it a few years later, SaaS taking over powered by all those 'AI' datacentres. Peak phone could even have happened if RAM becomes prohibitive, instead they're just windows on an all centralized, subscription web services. I see it as a pretty existential threat for my preferred way of life.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    Probably but with all the idiots fueled by sunken costs and desperate to prove they were right to invest, it could still last a long time.

    not necessarily with hardware though. now they are flush with investments and have holes burning in their pockets. everyone is trying to get in on the first stage of AI datacenters.

    they may artificially extend the bubble, but rapid hardware expansion/refreshing will be the first thing to slow down or stop when they see it’s not providing value.

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