DDR4 Prices: What the crap is going on?

[SketchMaster]

I'm sorry if I'm late on this topic but I'm scratching my head. I recently looked at upgrading from 32 to 64GB of ram and want to know why everything has close to doubled in price recently? This 16GB kit I bought back in 12/16 was $89, now it's close to $140!?

Educate me, please.

 

[UsandThem]

Demand and supply (and possibly a little price collusion like the good 'ole days):

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/you-thought-memory-was-expensive-now.2510430/

https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ncreasing-through-2017.2505169/#post-38884095

 

[SketchMaster]

Well crap... Guess it is what it is then. I picked a bad time to upgrade my camera, moving to 4k 10bit footage has unforeseen costs.

 

[UsandThem]

Well crap... Guess it is what it is then. I picked a bad time to upgrade my camera, moving to 4k 10bit footage has unforeseen costs.

Even though prices are pretty high, if you keep an eye on sales at Newegg or a site like Slickdeals, you can snag some at a decent price. But if you need the RAM immediately, there's not much else to do. Unfortunately right now RAM, GPU, and SSD prices are insane.

 

[SketchMaster]

I can go a bit longer without upgrading but I'm starting to run out of headroom as I get more complex with my projects. I have a Ryzen 1700 so upgrading from 2666 to 3200+ (maybe 3600? Is that even worth it?) will be a marked improvement for timeline scrubbing and render times.

Now to just figure out what works well with Ryzen...

 

[UsandThem]

I can go a bit longer without upgrading but I'm starting to run out of headroom as I get more complex with my projects. I have a Ryzen 1700 so upgrading from 2666 to 3200+ (maybe 3600? Is that even worth it?) will be a marked improvement for timeline scrubbing and render times.

Now to just figure out what works well with Ryzen...

From what I have seen, anything above DDR4 3200 has very limited performance returns.

However, I would read through the Ryzen builders thread in the CPU sub-forum because I believe it is a lot more finicky with faster RAM. It seems like several builders go with DDR4 2666 for stability/overclocking reasons.

 

[ksec]

I'm sorry if I'm late on this topic but I'm scratching my head. I recently looked at upgrading from 32 to 64GB of ram and want to know why everything has close to doubled in price recently? This 16GB kit I bought back in 12/16 was $89, now it's close to $140!?

Educate me, please.

This is what happen when you only have a few memory manufacture. Not to mention the demand for Semiconductor, whether they are NAND or RAM or Chips, seems to be outpacing supply with even the best prediction. Smartphone, IoT, Cloud Computing. Any single one of them has a knock on effect on the industry, and when you have all three with huge demand, price are quickly driven up. Even 28nm TSMC, and age old Node is out of supply at the moment.

And building Fabs requires some lead time.

I expect the price will stabilize or even lower once all the Fabs China has planned in 2018 are online. And then in typical Chinese fashion it will be a race to the bottom for the lower quality RAM and NAND.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

However, I would read through the Ryzen builders thread in the CPU sub-forum because I believe it is a lot more finicky with faster RAM. It seems like several builders go with DDR4 2666 for stability/overclocking reasons.

I would not recommend trying for high speed on Ryzen with 4x DR (dual rank) DIMMs right now. Be thankful if it works at stock speeds. The memory controller on Ryzen can be quite picky, people get best results with Samsung chips.

I was "unlucky" getting memory for my Ryzen system, my DR Crucial/Micron simply will not work above 2400MHz.

 

[SketchMaster]

There is a pretty good list of known good RAM over at OCN. After dumping the list to a spreadsheet it looks like there are a handful of 4x16 kits that will be able to run at 3200 or greater.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I was "unlucky" getting memory for my Ryzen system, my DR Crucial/Micron simply will not work above 2400MHz.

Yeah, I just got some Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 16-18-18-36, 1.350V 16GB kits. I instaled each of them into two of my Ryzen 5 1600 rigs with ASRock AB350M Pro4 mATX mobos, and they won't do 2933, 3066, or 3200. In fact, they don't really even like 2800. They do seem to work stable at 2667 @ 1.350V.

Note that that board has no easy UEFI setting for SoC voltage or LLC, although I'm not overclocking the CPU cores on those machines.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Note that that board has no easy UEFI setting for SoC voltage or LLC, although I'm not overclocking the CPU cores on those machines.

I think I've tried every trick in the book. Manually entering timings, upping SoC and memory voltage, LLC experimentation, fiddling with the more advanced settings, tried various BIOS etc. Still doesn't work above 2400. I've all but thrown in the towel and gotten a different known good kit, but I'm a little peeved at current DRAM pricing. For the time being as long as it work reliably, I'm good with 2400MHz. I can always change the kit when prices fall again.

I will just say apart from that, my Ryzen system has been 100% stable and reliable at stock speeds, so this in no way detracts from my opinion of the platform itself. It is technically overclocking, and that's never guaranteed to work.