Memory Matters
FEATURE
PRICE HIKES
If you haven’t built or upgraded a machine
recently, you might not realise that memory
pricing has gone crazy over the last 12–16
months. While, a year or two ago, the
amount of memory you put in a system
could be decided on a whim, it now has to
be a carefully thought-out plan if you want
to keep any machine up to date and capable
of the workloads intended. But why have
prices increased so much? And what are the
chances of them coming back down to more
reasonable levels?
The biggest problem for DRAM is that
producing flash is far more lucrative. Thereason for this is primarily down to one
thing: smartphones. The specifications for
these tiny powerhouses are constantly on
the rise, so the amount of storage and RAM
they ship with has risen sharply recently. As
they are premium products, the amount of
money being charged for them has gone
through the roof.
You might be thinking that high-speed
desktop DDR4 RAM has nothing to do with
NAND flash, and in a sense you’d be right,
but the plants that manufacture NAND are
also the ones responsible for our beloved
DDR4. So, because it’s financially moreadvantageous to switch over to NAND,
that’s exactly what has happened. It might
be important to us, but desktop RAM is
relatively low in the pecking order as far as
manufacturers are concerned. There is
another reason for the current high prices,
though, and that’s down to market demand.
We had some decent platform releases last
year, which meant there has been a slew of
people in the market looking to buy more
RAM. Yes, it’s Ryzen’s fault. Well, not really,
but the new platform has certainly not
helped the situation.
If you’re looking to upgrade a system
with more RAM, it could be worth hanging
tight for a little longer, because the memory
market has a history of righting itself. If
you’re looking to build a new system, your
options aren’t as obvious. Buy wisely. And
be ready to pounce when pricing does
return to more reasonable levels.MEMORY PRICING GONE HAYWIRE
We’ve collated the average memory
prices over the last two years. This is
an average of memory pricing on our
test machines on a per gigabyte basis
(which helps mitigate the fact that the
turbo build tends to use 4x 8GB
DIMMs, while the budget build uses a
pair of 4GB sticks). How we pick
memory for these builds is also
affected by pricing –if RAM prices are
high, we pick lower-frequency DIMMs.
So, there is some margin of error, but
the general trend shown in this graph
is hard to ignore.
2016$3.00$4.00$5.00$6.00$7.00$8.00$9.00$10.00$11.00$12.00$13.002017 2018IT COULD BE WORTH HANGING TIGHT FOR A LITTLE
LONGER, BECAUSE THE MEMORY MARKET HAS A
HISTORY OF RIGHTING ITSELF