| ▲ | magicalhippo 13 hours ago |
| Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory... still kicking myself for not just pulling the trigger on that 128GB dual stick kit I looked at for $600 back in September. Now it's listed at $4k... Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Now it's listed at $4k... You can buy 128GB of DDR5-6000 with a 9950X3D (not this newest X2 version, but still a $699 CPU) and a motherboard and a case for $2800 right now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails?ItemList=Com... If you don't need 128GB, there are quality 64GB kits for under $700 on Newegg right now, which is cheaper than this CPU. If someone needs to build something now and can wait to upgrade RAM in a year or two, 32GB kits are in the $370 range. I don't like this RAM price spike either, but in the context of building a high-end system with a 16-core flagship CPU like this and probably an expensive GPU, it's still reasonable to build a system. If you must have 128GB of RAM it can be done with bundles like the one I linked above but I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months if you can. There are signs that prices are falling now that panic-buying has started to trail off. 128GB of RAM should not cost $4K even in this market. |
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| ▲ | adrian_b 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | $2800 is still a huge price in comparison with the last year. Last summer, a 9950X3D + motherboard + cooler + 128 GB DRAM + VAT sales taxes was the equivalent of $1400 in Europe, where I live. That's half of your quoted price. That was without case and PSU, but adding e.g. $200 for those would not change much. | | |
| ▲ | alias_neo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In January I upgraded my desktop, 9950X3D £600, 64GB DDR5-6000 £600, MSI MAG Tomahawk X870E £300, Samsung 990 Pro 4TB £350, Asus Prime 9070XT £580. I spent a another £250 on PSU and cooler and reused my case (Phanteks Evolv Enthoo TG, beautiful case but horrible cooling. Will cut some holes in it and if it doesnt work out look for something with more airflow). The RAM price was already inflated at that time, and the same kit is now £800, but in October or earlier last year I'd have saved possibly the cost of the CPU/GPU on the whole thing, but now it's be about the cost of a CPU/GPU more expensive. On a side note for anyone not aware, 9950X3D isn't the best choice for pure gaming, 9850X3D is cheaper and marginally better, also I went with 2 sticks of RAM kit, 4 sticks is much harder to run at the advertised speed (6000) which is actually an overclock. Im a dev and a linux user/gamer hence my choice of CPU/GPU. | | |
| ▲ | sqquima an hour ago | parent [-] | | Very similar config, but I bought a second pair of ram. Running 4 sticks at 3600.
Also, the LAN port of the motherboard stopped working after a week, so I had to buy an Ethernet card |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes of course. We all know prices are up. I commented because someone thought that $4K was the going price for 128GB of RAM, which is way too much even with the demand crunch. | | |
| ▲ | adrian_b an hour ago | parent [-] | | Due to the high prices of DRAM and SSDs they now are the greatest fractions of the total price of a computer. In January I was forced to upgrade an ancient Intel NUC, by replacing it with an Arrow Lake H based ASUS NUC. The complete system with 32 GB DRAM and 3 TB SSDs has cost EUR 1200, including VAT sales tax. The distribution of the price was like this: Barebone mini-PC: 41%
32 GB DDR5 SODIMMs: 26%
2 TB PCIe 5.0 SSD: 24%
1 TB PCIe 4.0 SSD: 9%
Since then, the prices of DDR5 and SSDs have continued to increase, so now the fraction spent for memory would be even higher than 59%.Before 2026, for so small amounts of memory its cost would have been much less than the rest of the system. |
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| ▲ | sspiff 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I bought 192GB (4x 48GB) of DDR5-6400 for 299 euro in September but returned it because I couldn't get 4 DIMMS to run at decent speeds in the system. 6 or so weeks after I returned it the kit was listed at 1499. | | |
| ▲ | 2001zhaozhao 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah the only way to run 4 sticks of DDR5 decently is with Intel. It's a bit of a shame that you can't cram enough RAM to run big models. The most I could get running on 10GB VRAM + 96GB RAM was a REAP'd + quantized version of MiniMax-M2.5 | | |
| ▲ | mort96 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Got it running with 4800MT/s and literally 30 minute boot times in an AM5 machine. The 30 minute boot time could be worked around by enabling the (off-by-default) memory context restore option in BIOS, but it really made me think something was broken and it wasn't until I found other people talking about 30 minute boot times that I stopped debugging and just let it sit for an eternity. It's so bad. I don't get why they sell AM5 motherboards with 4 RAM slots. At least that system has been running well for like two years. But had I known that the situation is so much more dire than with DDR4, I would've just gotten the same amount of RAM in two sticks rather than four. | | |
| ▲ | WD-42 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m in the same situation! My machine will take 2-5 minute to post every few reboots, it seems random. The messed up part is the marketing material says this things can handle 256gb of ram or whatever absurd number, f me for thinking then 128gb should be no problem. Honestly this whole thing has soured me on AMD. Yea they have bigger numbers than intel but at what cost, stability? | |
| ▲ | secondcoming 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your machine takes 30 minutes to boot because of the RAM? Or it takes 30 minutes to load a model? | | |
| ▲ | WD-42 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's the RAM. It needs to "trained" which takes some time but for for some reason these boards seem to randomly forget their training, requiring it to happen again. |
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| ▲ | WD-42 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m running 128gb on a 9550x now with 4x32gb sticks and it’s terrible. It’s unstsable, post time is about 2 minutes (not exaggerating)and I’m stuck at a lower speed.
I’m considering just taking 2 of the sticks out and working with 64gb and increasing my swap partition. The nvme drive is fast at least. This is my first time off intel and I have to say I don’t understand the hype. | | |
| ▲ | magicalhippo 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It’s unstsable, post time is about 2 minutes (not exaggerating) The long POST times must mean it's retraining the memory each time, which is not normal. Just in case you haven'ttried it yet, I'd start by reseating them, I've had weird issues with marginally seated RAM before. Also you definitely have to go much slower with 4 sticks compared to two, so lower speed as much as you can. If that doesn't help, I'd verify them in pairs. If they work in pairs but not in quad at the slowest speed, something is surely wrong. Once you get them working in quad, you can start bumping up the speed, might need voltage boost as well. |
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| ▲ | HauntingPin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I had the same issue with Intel. It's not guaranteed there either. | |
| ▲ | jodleif 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Threadripper is a good alternative. No point having a lot of dual channel ram for LLMs, too slow |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No such bundle deals where I am. Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k. Cheapest 64GB kit is $930. The kit I was oh-so-close to buying was two 6400 64GB sticks. Not gonna buy now, not that desperate. I have a spare AM4 board, DDR4 memory and heck even CPU, I'll ride this one out. Likely skip AM5 entirely if something doesn't drastically change. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Absolute cheapest DDR5 128GB kit around is 2 sticks of 5600 64GB for $2k. That's not far from the bundle deal above, once you subtract the $700 CPU. If you really need 128GB the 5600 kit is fine. Having 208MB of total cache on the CPU means the real world difference between a 5600 kit and a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases. If you don't need to upgrade then clearly don't force an upgrade right now. I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now, even with the current situation. | | |
| ▲ | throwup238 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > a slightly faster kit is negligible in most use cases Does that “most use cases” caveat really apply to someone buying 128G of RAM? If I’m buying that much, it means I’m actually going to put it through its paces, unless it’s just there for huge reserved guest VM overhead. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The 208MB of total cache on the CPU we’re discussing does a good job of reducing sensitivity to RAM speed differences on this platform. If you’re trying to run LLMs off of the CPU instead of the GPU then the RAM speed dictates a lot. It’s going to be slow mo matter what, though. Dual channel DDR5 just isn’t enough to run large LLMs that start to fill 128GB of RAM and the difference between 5600 and 6400 isn’t going to make it usable. If you’re just running a lot of VMs or doing a lot of mixed tasks that keep a lot of RAM occupied then you’d probably have a hard time measuring a difference between 5600 and 6400 if you tried with one of these X3D CPUs with a lot of cache. This is a frequent topic of discussion for gamers because some people obsess over optimizing their RAM speed and timings and pay large premiums for RAM with CAS latency of 28 instead of 36. Then they see benchmarks showing 1-2% differences in games or even most productivity apps and realize they would have been better spending that extra money on the next faster GPU or CPU or other part. |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I just wanted to comment that $4K for 128GB of RAM is a very bad price right now Oh absolutely. Just mentioned it since I was very close to buying it back then, and now it's completely bonkers. That bundle deal is quite well priced all things considered, it basically prices the memory where it was. Again, sadly no great bundle deals here. |
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| ▲ | nicman23 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | that bs of you don't need 128 are toxic. what if you want to upgrade from ddr4 and you already have 128? |
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| ▲ | jofzar 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I really want a x3d because a game I play is heavily single threaded, I have the income and the financial stability but I can't in any good conscious upgrade to am5 with the ram prices. It's insane |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep exactly the same situation. I would not be surprised if we see casualties in adjacent markets, such as motherboards, coolers and whatnot. | |
| ▲ | fakwandi_priv 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AMD had an upgrade path with the 5700x3d, assuming you’re on AM4. Just reading now that they went out of production half a year ago which is a shame. I was very impressed being able to upgrade with the same motherboard 6 years down the line. | | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm the mythical customer who went from a 1700X in a B350 motherboard near launch day to a 5800X3D in the same board (after a dozen BIOS updates). Felt amazing. Like the old 486DX2 days. | | |
| ▲ | slightlygrilled 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same! Kept checking back for bios updates and even years later they kept announcing more support! Truly crazy. Other than the speed it’s a very good reason to go with amd, the upgrade scope is massive, on am5 you can go from a 6 core and soon all the way to a 24 core with the new zen6 |
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| ▲ | tyjen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I was waiting too, but the one game I play often that requires FPS performance decided to ruin their game with poor development direction. Now, I'm planning to buy for local llm hosting. Here's hoping to more developments like TurboQuant to improve LLM memory efficiency. | |
| ▲ | Panzer04 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What game, if you don't mind my asking? | | | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | tarangsutariya 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wonder how much sales amd and intel are losing because of tight DDR5 supply |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I can't imagine it's looking good in the consumer space, but server space seems to be lit[1]: Su said that typically, the first quarter (Q1) is slower due to seasonal patterns, but AMD has seen its data center business expand from Q4 into Q1, demonstrating ongoing strength across both CPUs and GPUs. This growth underscores the company’s ability to capitalize on rising demand for AI compute and enterprise workloads, even during traditionally quieter periods. “We are going into a big inflection year here in 2026. The CPU business is absolutely on fire.” [1]: https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/amd-ceo-... | |
| ▲ | aetimmes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | None. Every component is seeing huge demand. |
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| ▲ | throawayonthe 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| oh wow you weren't joking: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#xcx=0&b=ddr5&Z=131... (cheapest at $1240 USD) |
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| ▲ | tom_alexander 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Probably fun for those who already bought DDR5 memory Nah, those of us who already bought DDR5 memory also already bought decent CPUs. Dropping another $1k for these incremental gains would be silly. It'd make a lot more sense if DDR5 had been around longer so that people had the option to make generational upgrades to this CPU but DDR5 on AMD has only been around for Zen4 and Zen5. |
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| ▲ | snvzz 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am glad I decisively ordered 96GB (2x48) DDR5 ECC back in June, alongside the 9800x3d. I hope this is still enough for the planned upgrade to Zen7 in 2028. |
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| ▲ | mroche 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm looking at building a new system, and was waiting to see what happens with this chip and Intel's Arc Pro B70 card. I can't find ECC UDIMMs of 64GB per-stick to make 128GB, but I can put together two solo UDIMMs of 32GB or 48GB for $800 and $1000 per stick respectively. I really want to see what enabling the L3 cache options in the BIOS do from a NUMA standpoint. I have some projects I want to work on where being able to even just simulate NUMA subdivisions would be highly useful. | | |
| ▲ | snvzz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I was surprised to find that ECC modules available were 24 or 48, so 128GB with 2 sticks was impossible. While I was aiming at 128, I settled for 96GB, because any more than 2 sticks means a sharp drop in RAM clocks this generation. |
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| ▲ | Panzer04 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're basically me. I was mulling 48 vs 96, decided 200$ wasn't worth quibbling too much over and bought 96GB in August. Feeling pretty chuffed now XD (though still sad because building a new PC is dumb when RAM costs more than a 24 core monster CPU) | | |
| ▲ | snvzz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is the good side. The not so good side is that getting a RVA23 development board this year with an usable size of RAM (for e.g. compiling and linking large code bases) is not going to be cheap. |
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| ▲ | disillusioned 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Same... got 2x48 DDR5 for $304 back in February of 2025. Equivalent kits are going for $900-$1,100. Madness. |
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| ▲ | DeathArrow 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Meanwhile I hope my AM4 will chug along a few more years. I am fine with my 2 year old 128GB DDR4 for now. I will just upgrade the 14700K to 14900KS CPU and wait 2 more years. Judging by the benchmarks newer CPUs aren't much better for multithreading workloads than 14900KS anyway, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to upgrade to newer CPUs, DDR5 and a new mobo. |
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| ▲ | jmyeet 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| After randomly breaking the AM4 CPU and motherboard in my 4 year old PC last year and seeing that at the time I'd spent almost a new PC to get new parts and rebuild it. Less if I wanted to do a complete rebuild myself but I'm over building PCs. I've done that for years. It was an expensive mistake as I bought a few options to experiment including a NUC and an M4 Mac Mini but eventually bought a 9800X3D 5070Ti PC for <$2 and for no reason in particular I bought a 64GB DDR5-6000 kit for $200 in August or so. I checked recently and that kit is pushing $1000. I also bought a 4080 laptop and bought a 64GB kit and an extra SSD for it too last year. That's pretty lucky given what's happened since. I don't claim any kind of foresight about what would happen. I do kind of want to take the parts I have and build another AM4 PC. The 5900XT is not a bad option with 16 cores for ~$300 but my DDR4 RAM is almost useless because the best deals now are for combos of CPU + motherboard + RAM at steep discounts. You can get some good deals on prebuilts still. Not as good as 6+ months ago but still not bad. Costco has a 5080 PC for $2300. There's no way I'm going overboard and building a 128GB+ PC right now. I've seen multiple RAM spikes. We had one at the height of the crypto hysteria IIRC but this is significantly worse and is also impacting SSDs. I kinda wish I'd bought 1-2 4TB+ SSDs last year but oh well. We're really waiting for the AI bubble to pop. Part of me think sthat'll be in the next year but it could stay irrational substantially longer than that. |
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| ▲ | sundvor 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The C30 64GB kits are nearly impossible to buy now, so, well done. Got one in September '23 for ~$380 AUD, on the rare occasions it's available today it's been over $1600 AUD. I upgraded my UPS to a sine interactive unit to minimise the risk of it dying to bad power while the market is so crazy... |
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