yep always happens just before new gens come to market DDR5 anybody.

Quick, flood the factory!

Chinese foundries are coming online.

Yay! Now I can buy pointless amounts of ram just because!

great, more ram for everybody!

Here in Portugal that would be the price for a 16Gb kit. 16Gb of GSkill Flare X 3200mhz CL14 still costs 145€, where available of course. Only CL16 has gone closer or under 100€.

Well that graph in the article is somewhat right, but that's a kit that only been introduced in 2019. Check this out: https://geizhals.at/?phist=1339849&age=9999 If you check Corsair Vengeance LPX black kits with the same stats and qualities, you learn that it was below it's cheapest for a month. That kit was released at ~ €328 in Ocotober 2015, went down to ~ €180 in June 2016 (when I bought my RAM), reached it's lowest in the beginning of July 19 with ~ €130, and now is back up to just below ~€180. as of currently. Between those dates the price was never below ~ €280 and usually way above release price during 2018. Sorry that I can't post the picture right here (at work PC) but it shows that the kits might be getting cheaper, but nowhere near dirt cheap like at the end of a cycle of DDR, after it's lowest was after the widespread release and first DDR4 boards and CPUs hit the market... 10/15 - 330€ 06/16 - 180€ 07/19 - 130€ 08/19 - 180€ So as I see it yeah, good that they come down again, but they're not exactly getting cheap... they're merely less pricey. I bought my RAM in 2016 and honestly, I don't feel that reaching prices like 3 years ago is making me happy in the emotional way. And DDR cartels have earned themselves a crapload of money in the meantime, no big deal in going down with prices these days since they might already see their revenue rise with the release of DDR5 in the coming years. It just all smells like artificially inflated like @TheDeeGee hinted at with humor, but they just sell the end of inflation as their big generous act of lowering prices, which is just wrong. All IMHO, of course. For those that want / need to buy DDR4 now, I'm happy for you guys, you get normal prices again. I hope the wait is rewarded with kickass performance now 🙂

Willing to see more affordable B-Die RAM kits. Was about to buy a kit, decisions, decisions.

So at that point it'll basically be on-par with 2016 prices. Not that I'm complaining, but it's kinda sad it took so long. But yeah, DDR5 is most likely the cause for this. Overall, I'd say DDR4 was the worst RAM generation we've seen in nearly 20 years. It was a rough start for both Intel and AMD (and maybe ARM too, considering how few platforms support DDR4), the definition of "overclocked" was way too low, XMP rarely worked as smoothly as it should have, we had to deal with the price inflation, and despite the increase in bandwidth, it still wasn't good enough even for Intel iGPUs. I really hope they get DDR5 figured out to run smoother.

TheDeeGee:

Quick, flood the factory!

But only one, and not for real, then we'll raise prices in all others that are in other places on the opposite end of the Earth... permanently.

schmidtbag:

So at that point it'll basically be on-par with 2016 prices. Not that I'm complaining, but it's kinda sad it took so long. But yeah, DDR5 is most likely the cause for this. Overall, I'd say DDR4 was the worst RAM generation we've seen in nearly 20 years. It was a rough start for both Intel and AMD (and maybe ARM too, considering how few platforms support DDR4), the definition of "overclocked" was way too low, XMP rarely worked as smoothly as it should have, we had to deal with the price inflation, and despite the increase in bandwidth, it still wasn't good enough even for Intel iGPUs. I really hope they get DDR5 figured out to run smoother.

You think ddr4 was that bad? i agree to start with it wasn't great, in many cases slower than ddr3, but as time as gone along with the tighter timings and high clocks, they have really shown their strength. I don't think even ddr5 will be good enough for igpus to be frank, Gddr is ramping up far to fast, getting 16,000 mhz ram, it's kinda hard for DDR to keep up with that in terms of speed needed for games, specially mainstream games. But we shall see, igpus are perfectly fine for old gaming and some esports titles (kinda) but they were never intended to be for gaming in the first place. The one big issue i saw with DDR4 was the lack of LPDDR4 on say tablets and mobile devices where they kept with LPDDR3. But maybe me and you had very different experiences with it, and guess that's a shame in a way

its not actually 16,000mhz. the actual clock rate is 4000 but GDDR5x and 6 do 2 operations on the rising edge and falling edge of the clock cycle.

All nice and true, except for the old, good and out of production Samsung b-die chips...

Yep, cheapest 16GB RAM kit with Sammy B-Die are around 150€ and out of stock. Kinda but bummed by all this. Will try to shop outside trough Amazon or alternative methods.

Ricepudding:

You think ddr4 was that bad? i agree to start with it wasn't great, in many cases slower than ddr3, but as time as gone along with the tighter timings and high clocks, they have really shown their strength. I don't think even ddr5 will be good enough for igpus to be frank, Gddr is ramping up far to fast, getting 16,000 mhz ram, it's kinda hard for DDR to keep up with that in terms of speed needed for games, specially mainstream games. But we shall see, igpus are perfectly fine for old gaming and some esports titles (kinda) but they were never intended to be for gaming in the first place.

"Overclocked" speed is pretty much the only edge DDR4 had over DDR3, but, it costs so much much to get that. I think you are right to have doubts about DDR5 keeping up with iGPUs, but it will make a substantial difference if they can get it out the door with clock speeds that aren't so mediocre. I'm sure DDR5 would be fast enough to keep up with Intel's [current] stuff. If AMD were to support quad-channel for DDR5 then I think that'd be enough. I get the impression their rDNA architecture isn't quite as memory intensive as GCN was.

The one big issue i saw with DDR4 was the lack of LPDDR4 on say tablets and mobile devices where they kept with LPDDR3. But maybe me and you had very different experiences with it, and guess that's a shame in a way

That I actually wouldn't blame on DDR4. LPDDR4 is a real thing, but it seems ARM devices just never really took much interest. I'm sure most of this is because there's just simply no need. DDR3 is dirt cheap and I'm sure it has more than enough bandwidth for the CPU cores. The GPUs might suffer a little, but most ARM devices aren't expecting to play demanding games at high frame rates. Some of the Nvidia Jetson platforms seem to be an exception, but, that's an exception I think we can all agree is absolutely necessary.

schmidtbag:

"Overclocked" speed is pretty much the only edge DDR4 had over DDR3, but, it costs so much much to get that. I think you are right to have doubts about DDR5 keeping up with iGPUs, but it will make a substantial difference if they can get it out the door with clock speeds that aren't so mediocre. I'm sure DDR5 would be fast enough to keep up with Intel's [current] stuff. If AMD were to support quad-channel for DDR5 then I think that'd be enough. I get the impression their rDNA architecture isn't quite as memory intensive as GCN was. That I actually wouldn't blame on DDR4. LPDDR4 is a real thing, but it seems ARM devices just never really took much interest. I'm sure most of this is because there's just simply no need. DDR3 is dirt cheap and I'm sure it has more than enough bandwidth for the CPU cores. The GPUs might suffer a little, but most ARM devices aren't expecting to play demanding games at high frame rates. Some of the Nvidia Jetson platforms seem to be an exception, but, that's an exception I think we can all agree is absolutely necessary.

I guess it would depend where DDR5 started... 3200? 4000? i mean we could get lucky and it starts at 5000? though i have doubt's on that or the timings would be bad, DDR4 has not been able to get the same timings as DDR3. and yeah LPDDR4 is real, but to be frank it might as well not be with how few devices actually use it, which i think is a big shame. But i guess they know DDR3 is enough for same mobile games and media consumption, Though i would love to see like you Navi igpu with quad core ddr5 and see how that fares, though it might run into gpu issues before ram speed issues. Though i agree prices of DDR4 have been awful, i got the lucky spike of getting DDR4 ram when it was at its peak, think you can get the same kit as mine now for half the price, though i was willing to pay for it due to the high speed and low timings.

Where can we actually buy DDR4 RAM though that goes down with these frequent price fluctuations? I have a feeling that the big PC component sellers (like scan.co.uk) just keep the prices at their original sky-high price even though they are buying the kits much cheaper now, and just pocket the massively inflated margins themselves instead. I'm looking to buy this kit ( 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance RGB PRO Black, PC4-25600 (3200), Non-ECC Unbuff, CAS 16, 1.35V, AMD Ryzen Optimised) and its £175.49. The slightly faster 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance RGB PRO Black, PC4-27700 (3466) is a big jump to £238.99. I don't know if that bit of extra speed makes any difference to Ryzen 3900X though according to this, with latencies being the same for 3200 up to 3733... https://www.guru3d.com/index.php?ct=articles&action=file&id=51381 .

Nice, i'm still on 8GB after all these years lol so i'll wait for the price drop and then get 16 or 32gb depending on the price.