Really confused at the moment as to why the price of RAM seems to have nearly doubled since Christmas!?!? I haven't been doing any builds lately with exams but back in February I put 8gigs of vengeance 1600mhz in a client's build that only cost £33, and this seemed to be the norm at the time (<£40). Now with the arrival of Nvidia's 7xx series and the upcoming Z87 gear, I can't for the life of me find a decent pair of 4gig sticks for under £60!!! Anyone got any ideas as to why? I did a bit of searching but I just kept finding articles and forum discussions about DDR2 which has been expensive for a long time now that DDR3 is the norm. Hoping these prices will be going down soon, really don't want to go over the £1000 mark for a new rig (and I'm not including a case, HDD or PSU in that as I've already got spares from various other work) Thanks to anyone who can help my puzzlement!
supply and demand - last year we had an oversupply in the market and slowing down production takes time; now we have slower production , bigger oem contracts and new ram hungry video cards. all of which ends up meaning retail prices go up.
Has it nearly doubled? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search_results.php?keywords=16gb A year or so ago I paid about £112 for my 16gb 1866mhz ram... It looks to be about the same for that ram now.
Maybe not doubled, but got to be close to a 50% increase in price on most RAM. Magazines seem to be quoting (looking at you CPC) very out of date prices in "suggested builds" etc. for 1600mhz stuff.
I've just installed a trial for ramdisk software. Got interested after a tweaktown review... I wooden mind 32gb ram actually. Still happy with my 16gb though. http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/5487/superspeed-ramdisk-plus-11-software-review/index.html
A 50% increase sounds about right - I bought 16GB LP Vengeance not that long ago for £65, the same kit is now £100 on scan (well £99.79)
Same. My Kingston kit was £50(admittedly from the marketplace, but it was in line with market pricing). The cost for a 16GB 1600Mhz kit now...ouch.
Production is moving to more profitable business like specialist DRAM and eMMC, rather than NAND and DDR3. Demand is very low for DDR3 for a while as the PC industry remains constant but supply decreases as more phones/tablets are being sold. Don't expect prices to come down imo. Supply of good ICs is also extremely tight so prices are going to go even higher as demand increases next month.
I like my iPad... for a while I abandoned my PC would spend all my time on it. Now I'm back on PC and realising what a big step backwards it would be if desktop PC's gave way completely to tablets.
PC industry remains constant? Or in decline? Im sure its the latter, or did i mis-interpret your meaning with the rest of that sentence?
I don't think it is in decline; just different. Personal Computer = ??? Phone, Phablet, Tablet, Netbook, Notebook, Ultrabook, NAS Box, Media-PC, Thin Client, Desktop, Workstation, Server ??? It's more apt to say IMO that the PC is spreading itself thinner over a larger surface area. To borrow from Bilbo Baggins: “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
A quick look on the scan website shows some 4GB dual channel 1600MHz Corsair RAM for £25 and similar items for no more than £40, I agree prices have gone up but unless you're looking at really premium memory 4GB should be easy to find under £50
PC = desktop and notebook. Desktop maybe down but notebook is pretty constant. Some cheap tablets use normal DDR3 to save cost too. By 'PC' I was referring to anything 'personal computer'.
There is some wild variation on RAM price though for all those reasons... I sold some on the market place not long ago. I went online and found the same RAM and saw it was £40. So I thought, I'll do it used for £30 posted. Anyway, so the recipient would get warranty details for Scan, I dug out the original invoice. Needless to say, I'd paid less than £30 for it in the first place. I'd just caught the market at the wrong time / right time depending on how you look at it. Kind of felt bad that I'd done it afterwards, but you know, it happens and I didn't mean to sell it for more than or similar to what I paid for it....
@Parge My question was related to "Supply of good ICs is also extremely tight". From reading Bindibadgi's post, I thought there was also a problem related to production yields that adds up to poor demand. Hence my question. I still think this skyrocketing of prices is very strange, specially because some prices increased 30€ (at least here in Portugal) in a week (between December 2012 and January 2013).
