ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:11:

its interesting to see that games are no longer the most demanding tasks a graphics card can undertake

There is already clickbait circulating with the “new Ai chip” million times faster 1/10 the power.

All other methods obsolete .

See if the datacenters getting built end up as ewaste before construction finishes

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:57:

There is already clickbait circulating with the “new Ai chip” million times faster 1/10 the power. […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-01-30, 00:11:

its interesting to see that games are no longer the most demanding tasks a graphics card can undertake

There is already clickbait circulating with the “new Ai chip” million times faster 1/10 the power.

All other methods obsolete .

See if the datacenters getting built end up as ewaste before construction finishes

This is the problem I have with how many of these Datacenters they are building .. they are obsolete by the time the become operational, same with the huge stockpile of GPUs and memory they have for installation into these centers ...its all pretty much obsolete by the time they install it and that's assuming they can get the power and water required to even bring the center online.

I don't think they are that stupid.

Wouldn't be surprised if they were mining bitcoin in there with all the power plants' output they are building.

Steal the asset you create out the back door and let the private equity / banks / governments catch the fallout when their circular money scam eventually catches on fire.

When I originally bought my 64GB of RAM (DDR5) back in September 2025, it cost $350 (CAD). When I started the thread a little over a month ago, the price was $1050 (CAD).

I just looked at the prices again, and it's gone up another $200, now at $1250 (CAD).

That's a 3.5x price increase in the span of 4 months.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:08:

When I originally bought my 64GB of RAM (DDR5) back in September 2025, it cost $350 (CAD). When I started the thread a little over a month ago, the price was $1050 (CAD).

I just looked at the prices again, and it's gone up another $200, now at $1250 (CAD).

That's a 3.5x price increase in the span of 4 months.

Seems totally fine to me. I'm sure things will go back to normal soon.

*rubs hands together*

Yeah.

Yeah. Real soon, we'll be buying gaming PCs at 2015 pricing again.

Yeah.

*rocks back and forth*

Real soon.

One thing to possibly hope for, as least for DDR4, is the decommissioning of older datacenter hardware and the ensuing harvesting and recycling of memory ICs by specialized companies.

Whether there will be a commercially viable window of time for this to even happen, and benefit the consumer market before DDR4 becomes conpletely irrelevant is an open question. How much this might actually help with price pressure is another.

No such relief in sight for DDR5, unfortunately.

Either the excess RAM idles in a rando consumer's PC until it becomes obsolete or it's used to train and serve AI models to people across the world. It's a common theme in threads like this, people in the main can't argue that they have a beneficial use for the cutting edge hardware even though that's what they're walking themselves into when they talk about greed.

vvbee wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:39:

Either the excess RAM idles in a rando consumer's PC until it becomes obsolete or it's used to train and serve AI models to people across the world. It's a common theme in threads like this, people in the main can't argue that they have a beneficial use for the cutting edge hardware even though that's what they're walking themselves into when they talk about greed.

I have yet to see any legitimate use for these AI services.

It's clear they are only useful to a minority of people and the majority have no use for them or need for them.

So who is AI benefiting that we should be allowing it to eat up all the hardware and production capacity.

AI as it is benefits noone out side of the AI Bros or slop content farms.

So list your own uses for the hardware and we can compare.

Who need's more RAM, 640KB should be enough for everyone...ever.

Personally, my only use case for AI is Nvidia's DLSS, or to be more specific DLAA (I prefer not to use any lower modes). Now, I'm well aware of its downsides (increased input latency, random flicker, occasional artifacts etc.) but it does usually end up looking less blurry than TAA, which is sadly what 90% of today's games use by default. And to clarify, I don't use "frame gen". I just want the anti aliasing part.

That said, I would gladly give up DLAA if it meant RAM, SSD and GPU prices would return to normal.

When the bubble bursts, there is going to be a lot of very cheap DDR5 on eBay.

I'm still happy with DDR3 (although there is 1tb of it). Works fine for me.

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:35:

One thing to possibly hope for, as least for DDR4, is the decommissioning of older datacenter hardware and the ensuing harvesting and recycling of memory ICs by specialized companies.

Whether there will be a commercially viable window of time for this to even happen, and benefit the consumer market before DDR4 becomes conpletely irrelevant is an open question. How much this might actually help with price pressure is another.

No such relief in sight for DDR5, unfortunately.

Unfortunately the window for cheap recycled DDR4 from decommissioned servers was a year ago. Aliexpress was doing deals like a Xeon E5 2680V4, motherboard (remanufactured from salvaged chipsets) and 32gb of ECC DDR4 (2400 remarked as "3200" with new heatspreaders on an old Dimm) for $60. Now the same motherboard and CPU with no RAM is $90.

vvbee wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

So list your own uses for the hardware and we can compare.

My use for my RAM is keeping it out of the hands of AI people.

vvbee wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

So list your own uses for the hardware and we can compare.

It's a trap.

Joke aside I can already tell you are in the AI bro camp, likely a vibe coder or slop creator pretending the LLM is real AI.

All AI is thus far is a hardware whore sucking up vast quantities of hardware, power and money with zero ROI.

Oh yeah, the conspiracy theorists are about to clash with the "I'll defend everything that's unpopular nowadays" crowd, go get the popcorn!

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:35:

One thing to possibly hope for, as least for DDR4, is the decommissioning of older datacenter hardware and the ensuing harvesting and recycling of memory ICs by specialized companies.

Whether there will be a commercially viable window of time for this to even happen, and benefit the consumer market before DDR4 becomes conpletely irrelevant is an open question. How much this might actually help with price pressure is another.

No such relief in sight for DDR5, unfortunately.

It’s all registered so you will need a machinist x99 or an Intel Xeon ewaste system.

They are already shredding whole systems ddr4/5 based ram and all as ewaste for “reasons “ so unless someone gets extremely mad to stop the practice a lot of newer usuable equipment will continue getting destroyed for no reason.

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-28, 18:51:

To me it feels like past situations where an industry desperately wants to go out of business and loose all consumer sales. […]
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To me it feels like past situations where an industry desperately wants to go out of business and loose all consumer sales.

They literally are doing all the things, basically they don’t appear to want to sell you anything. Both 1st party and 3rd party software making amateur failures and hardware failing to deliver in a variety of perplexing ways.

So the question is why would anyone stick with x86? Feels like they are trying to do an IBM mainframe market re-enactment .

And what’s worse they literally could have done any number of small things differently in the last 20 to not be in this specific place.

I feel that too. Microsoft is breaking everything (including peripherals), hardware is sucking tons of power for insignificant performance gains, and there are weird failures like melting power connectors and business-class laptops using liquid metal. Some people are stuck with Windows for software support, but there's also the fringe "PCMR" social media groups happily trading off those weird hardware failures for 2% higher benchmark scores. (The trolls in this thread would have valid arguments about entitlement and overbuying RAM if that fringe represented the majority of PC users. Unfortunately, the hardware manufacturers are catering to that fringe instead of the average user.)

I think everyone is sticking with x86 for backward-compatibility as long as nobody has developed a compelling desktop/laptop-class CPU using a different architecture. Nobody has made a decent alternate CPU in that performance class except Apple, but they have a more tightly-controlled software development environment and some serious engineering talent. Microsoft and Qualcomm don't have that level of competence (or maybe they're trying to fail, but Qualcomm manages to screw up everything except cell phone chips). There are also server-class ARM chips, but those are used in specialized applications with the budget for custom software. Maybe there are other architectures besides ARM that offer the performance and low power consumption to convince people to switch from x86.

vvbee wrote on 2026-01-30, 17:17:

So list your own uses for the hardware and we can compare.

I will admit that I don't need 64GB of RAM, even with the level of multitasking I do. I could get away with 32GB for my mix of web browsing (Firefox is a major RAM hog), running VMs, video editing, and some basic simulations (nothing serious like what I do at work). I could upgrade the RAM in my i5-8500 system and keep it running for a while (currently 16GB), but the cheapest 32GB DDR4 kit I see on Newegg is $200.

At my job, I use all the RAM, which is a problem now. You can use cloud compute services to compensate, but I'd really like to avoid that level of Internet bandwidth usage from moving files around.

The problem for most of us is the cost of a basic (for modern software bloat) 16GB of RAM. People with more modest needs are more likely to have a smaller budget at the same time, so RAM prices are going to hit them harder.

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-01-31, 01:00:

darry wrote on 2026-01-30, 15:35:

One thing to possibly hope for, as least for DDR4, is the decommissioning of older datacenter hardware and the ensuing harvesting and recycling of memory ICs by specialized companies.

Whether there will be a commercially viable window of time for this to even happen, and benefit the consumer market before DDR4 becomes conpletely irrelevant is an open question. How much this might actually help with price pressure is another.

No such relief in sight for DDR5, unfortunately.

It’s all registered so you will need a machinist x99 or an Intel Xeon ewaste system.

They are already shredding whole systems ddr4/5 based ram and all as ewaste for “reasons “ so unless someone gets extremely mad to stop the practice a lot of newer usuable equipment will continue getting destroyed for no reason.

One might suspect that they are doing it very deliberately, same with all the manufactured hardware shortages and pricing hikes.

The truth is the top dogs don't want the consumers to own massive compute power like we currently have, they want to sell it to us in a nice subscription package just like they sell power and water to us. They have all this compute sitting in the datacenters and at this point they have no way to sell it to us. They also need to get their investment back from it and that's difficult if no one wants to buy your compute.

Well why not force people out of owning their own compute hardware or restrict the amount of compute we can personally own, collusion is a bitch and I feel there are several large tech corporations that are going to be investigated in the near future for fixing prices and hardware fabrication and a certain GPU corporation that is going to find out the hard way that money doesn't buy you protection from pissed off consumers and federal law suits.

AI is the smoke screen a convenient scapegoat to blame the deliberate price hikes and shortages on.

Safe to say none of this is by accident and they are all sleeping in the same bed diddling each other at the very thought of being able to lock consumers into a subscription service that they control.

Vipachei wrote on 2026-01-30, 19:50:

Oh yeah, the conspiracy theorists are about to clash with the "I'll defend everything that's unpopular nowadays" crowd, go get the popcorn!

Naw I have had Vvbee in the sin bin for many years now, there they will stay and I only reply to them if and when I deem it worth responding to.

Mostly I ignore their very existence.

Petty . .sure but I treat them the same way I treat the office Karen that refuses to turn her PC off and on again and would rather argue the point and claim they have already done that even when I can clearly see they haven't.

As for Conspiracies .. been the this industry for too long to believe anything is by accident or fate, assholes create problems and then try to sell you the solution.

Which is exactly what nVidia has been doing for years now, Jensen is quite good at selling his shit to the general public.