Right now I'm fighting the FOMO that is being spread on Reddit and social media regarding GPU pricing. Prices are for once creeping below MSRP, despite the forecasts and even direct comments from GPU makers saying they are either ramping down consumer GPU production or expecting supply to decrease.

I picked up an Asus 3080 TUF 10GB a couple years ago in pristine condition for $300 and it has suited me well, running quiet and reasonably cool with substantial power reduction from customizing the voltage curve. Still, that 10GB limit has me a bit itchy... I'm not playing anything that's having issues with 10GB right now, but if things go back to 2021 prices and stay there for years then 10GB is certainly going to become an issue eventually.

The thing that has been keeping me from actually wanting to buy anything though is that the current generation of cards is such a small performance improvement for what is still a substantial outlay of money. If I'm not hitting the VRAM limit or using frame gen, the difference between a 3080 and, for example, a 5070 is quite small (15-30%) and I'd still only get another 2GB of VRAM... for $500-$600? And I'm not sure if they still have this issue but last I heard they were having lots of problems with forced anisotropic filtering on 5000 series, which would directly impact me. So, I guess I'd have to spend $700-$800 on a 5070 Ti 16GB? Bleh. Doesn't sound like a reasonable use of money for me...

The Radeon 9000 series is a nice option, but the price vs performance difference is nowhere near high enough to make up for my familiarity with Nvidia's drivers, support and feature set on my personal system.

AI is the greatest malinvestment in the history of the US economy. It makes me angry thinking about it. Trillions flushed straight down the toilet.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 15:08:

Right now I'm fighting the FOMO that is being spread on Reddit and social media regarding GPU pricing. Prices are for once creep […]
Show full quote

Right now I'm fighting the FOMO that is being spread on Reddit and social media regarding GPU pricing. Prices are for once creeping below MSRP, despite the forecasts and even direct comments from GPU makers saying they are either ramping down consumer GPU production or expecting supply to decrease.

I picked up an Asus 3080 TUF 10GB a couple years ago in pristine condition for $300 and it has suited me well, running quiet and reasonably cool with substantial power reduction from customizing the voltage curve. Still, that 10GB limit has me a bit itchy... I'm not playing anything that's having issues with 10GB right now, but if things go back to 2021 prices and stay there for years then 10GB is certainly going to become an issue eventually.

The thing that has been keeping me from actually wanting to buy anything though is that the current generation of cards is such a small performance improvement for what is still a substantial outlay of money. If I'm not hitting the VRAM limit or using frame gen, the difference between a 3080 and, for example, a 5070 is quite small (15-30%) and I'd still only get another 2GB of VRAM... for $500-$600? And I'm not sure if they still have this issue but last I heard they were having lots of problems with forced anisotropic filtering on 5000 series, which would directly impact me. So, I guess I'd have to spend $700-$800 on a 5070 Ti 16GB? Bleh. Doesn't sound like a reasonable use of money for me...

The Radeon 9000 series is a nice option, but the price vs performance difference is nowhere near high enough to make up for my familiarity with Nvidia's drivers, support and feature set on my personal system.

Wait for the new 5000 super cards or 6000 and then see what used prices are like on prior Nvidia and AMD cards. Definetly don't waste your money on this stupidity.....and stay away from news about the latest and greatest until you need to buy. 😀

i am still doing fine on a mid tier 10 series card 😀

DosFreak wrote on Today, 16:07:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 15:08:

Right now I'm fighting the FOMO that is being spread on Reddit and social media regarding GPU pricing. Prices are for once creep […]
Show full quote

Right now I'm fighting the FOMO that is being spread on Reddit and social media regarding GPU pricing. Prices are for once creeping below MSRP, despite the forecasts and even direct comments from GPU makers saying they are either ramping down consumer GPU production or expecting supply to decrease.

I picked up an Asus 3080 TUF 10GB a couple years ago in pristine condition for $300 and it has suited me well, running quiet and reasonably cool with substantial power reduction from customizing the voltage curve. Still, that 10GB limit has me a bit itchy... I'm not playing anything that's having issues with 10GB right now, but if things go back to 2021 prices and stay there for years then 10GB is certainly going to become an issue eventually.

The thing that has been keeping me from actually wanting to buy anything though is that the current generation of cards is such a small performance improvement for what is still a substantial outlay of money. If I'm not hitting the VRAM limit or using frame gen, the difference between a 3080 and, for example, a 5070 is quite small (15-30%) and I'd still only get another 2GB of VRAM... for $500-$600? And I'm not sure if they still have this issue but last I heard they were having lots of problems with forced anisotropic filtering on 5000 series, which would directly impact me. So, I guess I'd have to spend $700-$800 on a 5070 Ti 16GB? Bleh. Doesn't sound like a reasonable use of money for me...

The Radeon 9000 series is a nice option, but the price vs performance difference is nowhere near high enough to make up for my familiarity with Nvidia's drivers, support and feature set on my personal system.

Wait for the new 5000 super cards or 6000 and then see what used prices are like on prior Nvidia and AMD cards. Definetly don't waste your money on this stupidity.....and stay away from news about the latest and greatest until you need to buy. 😀

Yeah, I definitely don't need a GPU right now.

It is looking like the next run of cards from Nvidia are basically delayed indefinitely though. Don't be surprised if we flat out don't get any more consumer GPUs for a couple years, other than maybe an Intel Arc B770 or something. The industry is shifting because selling any computer hardware to consumers is actually a bad financial decision for most of these companies, and their shareholders will not stand for that.

If the AI bubble bursts there might be some hope, but judging from the direction things are going with surveillance and military technology, it seems unlikely that we'll be going back to anything resembling a normal product release cadence for this stuff. There are far bigger markets for them to focus on, and there are plenty of GPUs out there still for computer games to continue to sell for a while. And once there aren't, get ready for game streaming subscription exclusive titles that are rendered remotely on the hardware they wouldn't sell to us.

\doom-and-gloom 😋

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 16:37:

And once there aren't, get ready for game streaming subscription exclusive titles that are rendered remotely on the hardware they wouldn't sell to us.

Yeah, that sadly seems to be the direction we're heading in. Gamers Nexus just covered it in a recent video.

Personally, I have big backlog of older games to work through, so I don't particularly care if the latest UE5 stutterfest needs some uber hardware that I will never buy. The only upcoming game that I want to play is the last part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. And if that doesn't run on my current hardware, which is unlikely, I'll get a second-hand PS5 and play it there.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 16:50:

Gamers Nexus just covered it in a recent video.

Well that was depressing AF.

it will collapse. The system will /eventually/ self-correct.

The current situations affects absolutely everyone (because RAM is everywhere) and feeding all RAM production to datacenters is not sustainable for long.

Yep. The current DRAM market is crazy, been following it. The bubble will burst, eventually.

Lucky for me, my current Ryzen 5600X/32GB DDR4 based builds are all way more than adequate to do what I want to do. All the modern systems in my home (myself, wife, daughter, server) are the same platform, much easier to maintain 4 of them that way. My "server" also just got a bump from 16GB DDR4 to 32GB thanks to a co-worker selling me a 32G 3600 Corsair kit for $30. More than worth it with today's prices. Moving to next gen Ryzen/DDR5 is just gonna have to wait, and I'm fine with that.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on Today, 16:50:

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 16:37:

And once there aren't, get ready for game streaming subscription exclusive titles that are rendered remotely on the hardware they wouldn't sell to us.

Yeah, that sadly seems to be the direction we're heading in. Gamers Nexus just covered it in a recent video.

Personally, I have big backlog of older games to work through, so I don't particularly care if the latest UE5 stutterfest needs some uber hardware that I will never buy. The only upcoming game that I want to play is the last part of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy. And if that doesn't run on my current hardware, which is unlikely, I'll get a second-hand PS5 and play it there.

🤣 Oh wow... that was good timing. They must have been publishing that video as I was typing my reply.

And yeah, between the massive backlog of retro games I have to run on old PCs and the massive backlog of newer (past 15 years) games that I have accumulated but not gotten around to playing, I'm not too worried about it. It seems like even some of what I consider the best games released in the past 20 years (like Subnautica) are having pretty "meh" sequels released, so I don't really even find myself looking forward to stuff like that anymore.

I'll admit that a large factor in even wanting to build these retro PCs lately is having a tangible machine that's all my own in a world of subscriptions, digital products, telemetry, etc.

But you know it's all particularly insidious when everything's been set up so that you have no choice but to participate / suffer simply so that you can be a functioning member of society. Like, I wish I could not have an NVIDIA card or Windows but I also need to use Adobe products for a living (sigh).

I'm a little more pessimistic about the bubble bursting anytime soon because while there's a ton of negative sentiment against AI, companies seem to be caring less and less about what their users think. Instagram for instance consistently pushes out terrible updates (not just in terms of AI integration) and they can get away with it because as above, a lot of people need Instagram to consider themselves functioning in the modern world. Don't even get me started on Adobe.

For the time being, I think we need to make decisions without the expectation of the bubble bursting.

I looked at my order history, and I paid $153 for a 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 kit in January. What really sucks is that my "upgrade" that the RAM was part of was a total disappointment to the point where I wanted to go back to the old system, but I was running out of RAM (16GB of DDR4). A GPU upgrade might be nice (I'm still using integrated graphics in both desktops), but the market is just "low-end gaming cards without enough RAM" that cost too much and draw too much power for the benefit they might provide me with the games I play and applications I run. I want something like the Nvidia T1000 in my laptop, but with current-gen video encode/decode hardware.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 16:37:

If the AI bubble bursts there might be some hope, but judging from the direction things are going with surveillance and military technology, it seems unlikely that we'll be going back to anything resembling a normal product release cadence for this stuff. There are far bigger markets for them to focus on, and there are plenty of GPUs out there still for computer games to continue to sell for a while. And once there aren't, get ready for game streaming subscription exclusive titles that are rendered remotely on the hardware they wouldn't sell to us.

That's what I'm afraid of. If the bubble truly bursts instead of hitting market saturation and quietly leveling off, then the datacenters will be repurposed for surveillance against us and demand will stay just as high.

I really feel like we're powerless, and anyone with the power to change things is either trying to distract us (and they're successful - see the "woke" comment earlier in this thread, for example) or telling us about their plan to consider making a plan to start thinking about making a plan to possibly compromise within the next 30 years (that's how every "don't worry, the EU will save us" news article reads to me). It feels dirty to say that on a computer forum (too political), but that's how dark things are feeling for me right now.

sunkindly wrote on Today, 20:21:

But you know it's all particularly insidious when everything's been set up so that you have no choice but to participate / suffer simply so that you can be a functioning member of society. Like, I wish I could not have an NVIDIA card or Windows but I also need to use Adobe products for a living (sigh).

I also have to use Windows-only software (not Adobe), but it's on a company-issued computer separate from my personal stuff. I only have one modern system that still runs Windows for personal stuff, and that's because of a lack of video capture software for Linux that works with older non-UVC capture dongles (I don't know of any UVC devices that can capture composite or S-Video at good quality for tape archival).

sunkindly wrote on Today, 20:21:

I'm a little more pessimistic about the bubble bursting anytime soon because while there's a ton of negative sentiment against AI, companies seem to be caring less and less about what their users think. Instagram for instance consistently pushes out terrible updates (not just in terms of AI integration) and they can get away with it because as above, a lot of people need Instagram to consider themselves functioning in the modern world. Don't even get me started on Adobe.

That's why I'm predicting quiet market saturation instead of a full collapse.

I built a rig this year with 64GB of DDR5, here are the prices I looked at in January 2025 when shopping at my local Microcenter:

• 2x G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series (AMD Expo) DDR5 RAM 32GB (2x16GB) 6400MT/s CL30-39-39-102, price: $249.98 USD
• Corsair DOMINATOR TITANIUM RGB 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 DRAM 6600MT/s CL32 Intel XMP, price: $290.99 USD

Ended up going with the Corsair memory, so 2x32GB instead of 4x16GB. It's definitely enough for what I do today and I tend to build new rigs every 5-10 years so hopefully it will last a bit. My last rig was Haswell :D

I wonder about the theory that Samsung's other wings are suffering too, like laptops or phones being squeezed too. I thought Samsung would allocate production to themselves first and sell the rest, but maybe they've made it more profitable to just sell the chips directly and let their other products get delayed.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

DDR5-6000 2x32GB

For a bubble bursting to be useful to you it's the core idea of AI usefulness that would need to go away, because what's the use to you of for example the majority of approaches to AI failing if those that don't fail can still use up all the compute they can get for what are in reality useful pursuits. More realistic would be to argue it's more useful that you continue having affordable DDR5 memory or whatever, but then this may not be the case.

LSS10999 wrote on Today, 06:30:

It seems DDR4 has also gone up to as much as how it used to be many years ago, when it was still mainstream and DDR5 wasn't even out yet.

I even heard words about how DDR4 has become more expensive than DDR5 lately, though I can't really verify such, as I don't have any DDR5 systems yet so I haven't really checked about current and historical price levels of DDR5.

At present I've a DDR4 system on which one of the modules installed have gone faulty and needs replacement... only to find out the price has skyrocketed... so I have to postpone any plan for getting spare modules for now...

I still am only up to ddr3, 🤣 and supposedly there are still overseas manufacturers making pretty much every style of ddr for various applications, my guess is that they are likely all lower capacities than modern folk would want.

Anyway
By the time DDR3 was released and DDR4 was in development DDR5 was already being spec’d and on the roadmap, there is enough in common between these different types of ram that the desktop memory sockets could have been standardized with the same pin counts albeit some signalling pins missing or behaving differently. (Remember when EDO and sdram had a universal style dimm socket with a voltage setting)

It is rather criminal that the behaviors and pinouts were already known 15 years ago but the standards committee couldn’t keep them in the same socket with interchangeable memory types.

This would keep costs down allowing
Consumers to use (or re-use) ram understanding the performance consequences without wasting board space and money on multiple ram socket types.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 13:52:

I had been using 16GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3000 in my X570 system since 2019, but in July of 2023 I saw a really good price on a 64GB (2x32GB) kit of Mushkin Redline Stiletto DDR4-3600 CL18 and grabbed that for $109 including tax. I figured at the time that my 5800X3D would last me a very long time, so why not get a big pile of RAM to finish the system off while the prices were low? That ended up being quite a good decision!

Similar for me, but more recent. In July 2024 I bought three 2x32Gb kits for £112.99 each. 64Gb went to my Ryzen 5800XD main gaming PC and 128Gb went to my Ryzen 5950X hypervisor PC (runs 4 gaming virtual machines).

I still use both systems. No plan to upgrade. 5800X3D with RTX 3080 Ti is still great.

Hoping wrote on Today, 12:42:

I'm not surprised either, as the amount of RAM has been stagnant for years. Back in 2010, I installed 16GB of DDR3 for the Phenom II 1100T because it was cheap. Nowadays, 64 GB is considered a lot, but in my opinion, that's ridiculous. 64 GB should be considered the minimum today, 128 GB should be acceptable, 256 GB should be standard, and 512 GB should be for enthusiasts. The same goes for consumer SSDs, which have been pretty much stagnant at a maximum of 4 TB in general.
In these respects, hardware has been very stagnant. It is normal for such a strong software advance as AI to suffer from this stagnation. And to show a great imbalance.

I absolutely agree. This recent tripling of prices will only hurt things. Total system RAM will remain stagnant or even decrease due to this current faddish egregious cost. We should be seeing 128GB standard systems by now- as a minimum. Back in 2010, 16 gb of DDR3 was only about $50, 32gb was considered enthusiast and you could get that for a little over $100. I couldn't even speculate how much 512 GB of DDR5 RAM would cost now. Thousands?! Which motherboard will actually accept that much RAM? None?

It's this stagnation which doesn't bode well for the industry. CPUs have also stagnated, especially at Intel. Not much increase in literally 15 years. My i7 2600k still rocks very well today at 5 Ghz. Building systems is no longer cheap. With SSDs more than doubling, RAM tripling or quadrupling, and components also greatly increased, it's a cryptically expensive endeavor. The days of the $200 basic system are over. One could almost argue that AI (coporate greed) and gaming is hurting the hobbyist industry more than helping it. Is there even a hobbyist industry any longer? It's a sad state of affairs.

During the last 50 years, the trend has been toward commodization, and prices kept falling and falling for similar amounts of power in computer systems. Now, it's toward profit and rapaciousness at all costs. There is no Moore's Law any longer. Prices will just keep rising. Stagnation is very, very bad, but that'll be the trend.