Holy fuck. That is insane. It used to be something like 5-10% max.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026
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35% is the kind of numbers I used to have on servers at work, which often feature >2TB of RAM.
(another similar percentage being the CPUs, 128 cores per socket doesn't come cheap)
Seeing those numbers for desktop hardware, "holy fuck" is about right.
Yeah. Scientific and high performance compute are really eating it on ram prices right now.
And using less memory is much harder than just opening fewer browser tabs.
Software is designed to eat memory for it was very cheap in the past. Well, comparatively.
For data center shit, it’s probably up in the 70-80% range (unless you’re also running shitloads of H100s or A100s or whatever top of the line is these days)
And it's never going away because the technology for RAM by subscription is right around the corner.
VDI has been a thing for over a decade now.
PC manufacturers should grow some balls and tell RAM suppliers to lower the price or lose their business forever.
The RAM suppliers would probably be thrilled to end those consumer contracts, they could allocate more to high paying AI.
There's no guarantee that AI companies will need this amount of product indefinitely, while PC manufactures will always need RAM. Alienating them would be commercially foolish.
Foolish in the long term, but quite effective in the short term.
I don't disagree, but it seems their priorities are not on long term stability.
They do this because everyone else allows them to. I think computer and device manufacturers have more leverage than RAM manufacturers if they join together. Yet they don't, because today's management class is vastly incompetent.
That's exactly why they can alienate them. The PC manufacturers don't really have many vendors to choose from.
For now. Would you risk a long-standing relationship with your most important customers for a temporary boost in income?
Wouldn't be the first time. They got caught in a huge price-fixing scandal just about a decade back and nothing changed.
And again, where are the customers going to go? There's only so much capacity and no one's building new plants.
no one’s building new plants
so far
Agreed, which is stupid to put everything to AI but no consumer to use the goddamned AI 😮💨
good luck negotiating with the AI cartel
My base starting point parts list (full build with 9800x3d, 64GB/4TB, 9700xt) was 2000usd about five months ago when it was last used to base a build on.
It's currently 'down' to about 3400 after peaking last week at over 3500. The excess is nearly entirely from RAM and SSD prices.
Fortunately you can save money by not buying HP PCs.
If run prices get out of hand don't buy more RAM don't upgrade your computer don't give them your money and then when the bubble pops continue not to give them your money. All these manufacturers need to fail
Hopefully, as a side effect of the current situation, software developers will be a bit more mindful of ram consumption. The "just buy more RAM bro" argument isn't really working nowadays.
Just rent more bro
Just download more bro.
Mmmm chocolate bars