Say you just built a shiny new system only you notice that you forgot one thing
ram no problem ram's been pretty cheap over the last uh at least the last year or two the price
fixing days are over so let's hop on over to amazon find ourselves a kid on the cheap
oh no oh please no not ram again stay with me to get rid of that annoying activation watermark hop
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this video is obviously about a ram and if you've been shopping for a kit as of late you've probably
noticed that prices have gone up um well a bit i first posted this on twitter about a week ago
and it seems like i timed that post quite well because other articles were picking up on the same
things i was around a 25 to 30 percent increase over this time last year but if you look very
closely at the trends you'll see that the prices have really started jumping for the last two or
three months so this tray here comes straight from pc part picker and i wanted to show you this one
specifically which is for an eight by two uh kit which is pretty common 16 gigs is a sweet spot
it has been for quite a while for gaming and a 3200 megahertz frequency is also a sweet spot
especially for ryzen built you can see a pretty flat trend throughout 2020 actually prices were
a tad bit lower in 2019 but as to be expected with the covid small price bump across the board here
but ever since 2021 look at these prices just been trending upward actually this black line
is supposed to represent i believe the average but a lot of these kits that are below that black line
have been the deals the bargains that i've been going for especially my own personal builds when
i don't get ram sent to me for a build these are usually in the 50 to 60 70 dollar range
for a 3200 megahertz 16 gig kit that's pretty awesome in fact we have a dedicated video
about an alloy kit of ddr4 same specifications same capacity everything i think it was 55
60 bucks the cheapest i had seen a kit like this uh ever and that is pretty much unheard of now
finding this sort of configuration for 60 bucks it's just unless you're buying used it's probably
impossible now now this news really isn't news to people who have been kind of following this trend
in the industry in fact articles from pc gamer and the like back in january of this year were calling
ram prices skyrocketing and they were saying that back then would have been a great time to buy
ram i still think it's probably an okay time to buy ram i know that people you know you see oh
ram prices are increasing oh i'm not going to buy it now i'm going to hold out for another year
i don't really think that's the smartest play either and here's why supply and demand and i've
got to say even though i love economics there's like a big concentration of mine in college i
hate that phrase at this point in 2021 it's been so overused i feel like even i've overused it to
an extent when it comes to describing the things that we're seeing in the markets like the cop-out
oh yeah it's just supply and demand that's why graphic scores are priced the way they are supply
and demand blame the invisible hand anyway that aside we really wanted to dive into the details
here yes that is a factor the demand for ram has never been higher because the demand for consumer
pcs has never been higher but you've also got to look at production you've got to look at ddr5 the
anticipation of ddr5 arriving possibly in q4 2021 more than likely 2022 if i'm being frank fifth gen
ryzen whatever intel comes up with that's that's actually a viable step in the right direction if
i'm being honest those platforms and very likely they'll utilize cdr5 that would be the next
big step the next logical step and that from a supplier perspective means that you kind of have
to begin the talk right about phasing out ddr4 i don't even remember why i had this article up
uh something about supply and demand yep there it is but as ddr5 production ramps up and we're
not just talking about for your average gaming pc we're talking about for the server market which is
freaking huge the smartphone market the sodium laptop market the suppliers know about these
things they know roughly when these platforms will launch and they need to scale production
accordingly to meet that initial demand so it's an ebb and flow naturally as production for one unit
increases production for the other has to decrease assuming that your resources remain the same
throughout so you have to focus more of those resources toward where you expect most of the
demand will be and in a few years that will most definitely be ddr5 and i mean just look at ddr3 as
an example an inferior technology that is more expensive than the newer shinier ddr4 so it's
gonna happen ddr4 will continue i expect to become more and more expensive sure you can always find
cheaper kits on used sites and if you want to buy used you think that there's real value there and
oftentimes there is that is a perfectly viable solution to this problem but i don't think that
it's the end-all be-all if you happen to spend at 20 30 more for a kid of ram now than you would
have three or four months ago yeah it would have been nice to have pocketed that extra money or
reallocated it somewhere else in the budget but at the end of the day i don't think that
it should be the sole reason why you don't build a pc right now or don't upgrade your system graphics
cards are still the biggest problem by far in this market and there's not much we could do about that
other than weight and don't be one of those guys who buys from a scalper it doesn't really matter
which kit we're talking about here they've all for the most part been affected in a negative way and
the economics in the pc industry right now are just so out of whack um that i don't expect this
will get any better any time soon this is the trickle down effect of graphics card prices the
the spike in demand that we've seen over the past year is now affecting other components and i don't
see how we could fix this in the immediate i don't think that there is really a sense in waiting for
these prices to return to normal because by the time they would ddr5 will be here or at least
be right there on the cusp and prices will reflect the drop in production on the ddr4 side and you'll
be double shafted at that point um so if you were deterred before i wanted to make this video just
to bring to light if you hadn't already noticed um the fact that prices have yes gone up if you've
been shopping for a kid as of late they are a bit more expensive than they were a few months ago
but i don't think it's the end of the world 20 to 30 dollars i mean when it's in the context of how
shafted we're being by the graphics card market i don't think this is a huge deal i don't expect
it's going to get any better though so waiting just because of ram it really makes no sense if
you're on eight gigs right now and you're thinking about buying a 16 gig kit or buying an extra dimm
to make it 16 in total if you have a single eight gig stick um i don't think there's really
any shame in buying now yeah it's more expensive yeah you didn't time it perfectly but nobody has
20 20 future vision ah okay maybe you should have seen this coming but i don't think it's the end
of the world if you buy right now so all that said don't freak out and the good thing about
ddr4 is that there's plenty of it in supply unlike graphics cards at this point which are selling out
as quickly as they're hitting the shelves you can hop onto amazon right now and buy any kit
of ram that you want sure it'll be 10 to 20 maybe at the most 30 more expensive than it was before
but dram was never really that expensive to begin with at least with respect to what we're paying
for graphics cards and cpus uh if you're spending you know 500 bucks on a 64 gig kit okay yeah
that's a pretty sizable purchase but you know 60 70 80 bucks for a 16 gig kit of ddr4 um isn't
a huge chunk of most budget builds out there and uh as a result i don't think that this should
ultimately dissuade you from either upgrading ram kits or building a system that maybe relies on an
older graphics card that you've got laying around or maybe even an apu in a dire situation with that
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subscribing and i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me