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Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-Year Low
alphadogg writes "DRAM chip prices reached a one-year low on Tuesday and approached their cheapest ever due to a post-holiday oversupply. The cheap memory chips are pushing PC prices lower too, a Taiwan-based trading platform said.
Prices for commodity 1-Gbit DDR3 DRAM chips dropped to an average of $0.84 per unit from historic highs around $2.80 in April and May last year, said Ivan Lin, publicist and editor with DRAMeXchange. Prices hit a record low of $0.81 per chip in March 2009, according to the exchange's daily surveys."
Would that Scotch,
Were so cheap by the DRAM,
A shave, a shot, a gig;
Still change for the tram.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
"I got an action figure!" "I got some DRAM chips!" "I got a rock."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
historic highs around $2.80
You want historic highs? I remember a DRAM crunch in the 1980s when prices spiked at about $1000 per megabyte. (That's about 150,000 times more costly per bit than current prices.)
Now, get off my lawn.
Not to mention illegal. :P
That's probably for the chip, before it's soldered onto a DIMM, before it's even left the factory.
You'd be amazed how much money needs to be spent to turn it into something you can actually plug into your PC.
Can the average PC user....be trusted not to screw anything up inside a desktop or laptop PC when installing RAM sticks?
From personal experience, yes. Show them a picture of where the ram slot is, how to insert it, and "make sure the notch lines up", and generally they either figure it out (80%), or call for help (20%).
Non-techies arent morons, you know, and installing ram is intentionally very hard to screw up.
Not to mention illegal. :P
Tell that to OPEC
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Its also per gigaBIT, not gigabyte. Multiply by 8 and you have $22.40 sticks dropping to $6.40. I do remember it being around $20 a gig a while ago, and if you check current prices RAM is about $8 a gig now.
Yes, that's right. DDR2 is 'over the precipice' - it's old technology at this point.
We're kind of at a point similar to where we were in the mid-90s, where the "last generation" (high end 486) systems were just as fast/comparably fast to "this generation" (early Pentium) processors, but RAM support (and availability, utility, etc.) was more significant.
Right now, any system 3-5 years old is likely to be 'good enough' for most peoples' tasks - all except the most demanding users. The bottleneck will be RAM. On the older systems with only 1-4GB of DDR2 support (or present), this is going to start being a problem.
We ran into the same thing a couple years ago with DDR, and a couple years before that with PC133: smart and/or financially capable people bought as much of the stuff as they conceived they'd need to keep those systems supplied long enough to replace them outright. (In many cases, I know that DDR RAM held those systems out until quite recently.)
In most cases, systems with DDR2 are nearing their EOL anyway. They're a bit aged, and very few have been produced OEM in the last year or so. DDR is "gone", so to speak; DDR2 will be there in a year or so, at this rate.
DDR3 is technically superior to DDR2 in almost every way: it's lower power, runs cooler, and is markedly faster. The chipsets which interface with it are better. Forget DDR2 and move on; it's old tech. Use the systems for what they can do and don't fret it - just replace them if you need to.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Which is conveniently under US jurisdic....
oh wait...
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Aren't you contradicting yourself a bit? Those 3-5 year old computer have 1GB or 2GB RAM already and they are being sufficient. I have a laptop, bought in January 2007, so it's 4 years old. I came with 1GB RAM, it now has 2GB RAM because it was a cheap upgrade. It was a laptop on sale because it couldn't reach Vistas requirements, so back then 1GB wasn't all that hot either. So, unless you meant those "demanding users", for a normal user 1GB is enough, 2GB better.. Beyond that not so much.
I do advocate to take the most RAM you can afford for any machine you have and I have done this since at least 2005. My wifes new iMac has 16GB RAM. Does she need it? No... But the day she thinks it's too slow, I can just say... "Sorry, it's already maxed out, I can't do anything". It gives a bit more headroom, but I've never seen it use more than 4GB (which is what it came with). I'd call it "anti-bitching-insurance". ;-)
Same thing with my brothers new computer: got 16GB for it. It was two 8GB kits at 75€ or so... Not exactly expensive.
Will they use it? My wife definitely not. My brother may or may not benefit from it given he plays a lot of games.
For me? I live on what comes out of the dumpsters and buy left and right stuff to upgrade. Got a AMD Athlon 64 X2 socket 939 somewhere and 4 sticks of 1GB DDR RAM. Bought myself a motherboard that supported that, and whammo, for the price of a new motherboard I got myself a machine that's more than enough for anything I throw at it.