Oversupply Sends DRAM Prices To One-Year Low 161
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."
More history (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Calls for a libation (Score:2, Insightful)
Who're the fucking killjoys who moderated that Offtopic?!
That comment is pure gold. Best FP I've seen in a while. And I've made +5 Funny first posts myself, so I believe I might just know what I'm talking about when I say that comment deserved at least +6.
Mods, get your heads screwed on straight and grow a sense of humour.
Posting anon because this is offtopic and I know it. Meh.
Re:Can Joe Sixpack be trusted to install RAM? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:What Do You Do When Demand Is Satisfied? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not to mention illegal. :P
Tell that to OPEC
Re:DDR2? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:DDR2? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.