I called it first: Memory prices are going back up

Halfway through last year I made a couple of mentions on the NAG Forums, on NAG Online and in other places on the internet that the market for desktop memory was beginning to stagnate. The prices for DRAM dropped so low that the companies making these chips actually weren't earning enough money to stay afloat and I didn't expect that to last any longer than a year (prices have been dropping steadily since 2009).

Turns out, my prediction that RAM prices would rise this year are correct: from next month, we're going to see prices for 4GB DDR3 DIMMs spike to $20 each minimum, from their previous lows of $17. $3 doesn't seem like much of a change but that's only for one manufacturer. Some brands are already seeing increases in the $10 range and its probably going to increase and continue throughout this year (possibly the next, too) as companies try to artificially increase prices to stay afloat. If you wanted to pick up some RAM on the cheap, now's the time to do it. Coupled with our import tax and whatever else the government adds onto our hardware, we'll be paying anything upwards of R300 for a 4GB module soon enough.

Source: Digitimes

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

To go 4x4gigs now or not. Difficult life choices

Would fill up all your slots, but 2x 8GB would also work. Some of those 16GB kits are going really cheap. The price hikes will probably hit us in a month, so you have some time left to mull over it.

To be honest I don't see a reason to get more than my current 3x2GB setup. I may go for 2x4GB for future compatibility, but that's about it. Doubt I'll be upgrading from X58 soon anyway.

But then you'd lose the bandwidth the third channel provides. I think you can stick to 6GB for now, its more than enough for what you're doing.

Well I just managed to wangle an upgrade to an oldish X58 board and i7 chip, but I had to cough up for the RAM. Decided to go with 3x4GB since it was only 150 bucks extra over the 3x2GB. I know I'm unlikely to come anywhere near that 12GB limit, but considering how seldom I upgrade, I know I'm safe for the next few years.

Heh, I wish I could have gotten the same bargain! My Athlon X3 will be showing her age this year, although its likely that even in the event that I do move to a quad-core AMD chip, I'll still be sitting with more or less the same performance because my HD6870 limits me with its ****ty 1GB VRAM.

Which i7 chip was it? Maybe you can post your experience with the "new hardware" later on? I know the move from C2Q to Core i7 for many wasn't the kind of performance jump they expected, but that was in the XP/Vista days. I'm expecting there's a much wider gulf in performance today than there was back then.

It's an i7 975X. Board is a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7. RAM is a Corsair matched set of XMS DDR3-1333.

I haven't extensively tested my machine since I've upgraded, and I can't remember the last time I ran a synthetic benchmark on it so I don't have much in the way of hard numbers, but I can say that it definitely feels faster. Game load times are way down and the occasional stutter I had in games is completely gone. Average frame rates seem to be about the same, but then that's to be expected. Rendering has obviously jumped massively in terms of performance. It's not quite an eight-core but, gosh, 3DS Max loves those extra threads that my C2Q lacked. WinRAR performance has taken a pretty big leap too.

But, yeah, there's not much of a performance jump in gaming, just a general smoothing over of things, which I'm happy with. Mind you, if I had paid full price for this setup when it was brand new I might've been a bit bummed not to see a bigger jump in performance, but I guess that's just how it goes with CPUs - gaming is seldom affected all that much.

Overall I'm happy. Can't really complain given the price I paid :P

*whistles* Man, a UD7. Oooh, I remember when I first held that board before building it into a rig for some rich schmooze who was picking it up that same day. I really, really didn't want to let go.

I worked with a UD9 a week later. It was so strange... it costed far more, but didn't feel so right.

How much did this get-up hurt your wallet?

Telling wouldn't be gentlemanly, but cheap.

That's the beauty of the X58 setups now, for the average gamer and power user it really isn't far behind SB in performance, but you can pick it up very cheaply. I remember I bought my setup last year january, paid R2100 for a 920 D0, a new Gigabyte USB3.0 and 6GB of Kingston ram.