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Over the course of 2017, the prices of RAM have been in flux, often breaching double that of the original. This could all change soon, however, as a recent drop in memory chip pricing spells good news for incoming memory kits.
The boom in prices for memory chips largely relates to the demand created by the smartphone market, which is takes up approximately one-third of the global memory chip market overall.
Reports of the market losing steam has helped the prices of high-end flash memory to drop as much as 5 percent at the end of last year, according to Reuters, prompting industry experts to predict that its growth rate will fall by more than half this year to 30 percent.
While this prediction has led to a similar fall in shares across leading memory manufacturers, with Samsung and SK Hynix falling 7.5 percent and 6.2 percent respectively, the benefits are expected to land on customers as prices are forecast to drop for the first time since mid-2016.
“Memory chips will likely see a gradual price decline in 2018 if demand remains strong and appetite from severs holds,” Lee Jae-yun, analyst at Yuanta Securities Korea, told Reuters.
Of course, analysts don’t expect the market to crash which similarly means that we’re unlikely to see the prices RAM once was, but it remains to be seen as to what kind of price drops will come.
KitGuru Says: I think I speak for all of us when I say it’s about time we saw prices stabilise a bit, as purchasing components or even a full build in the past year has been an absolute joke. We’re not alone in feeling like that, however, as companies also want to see prices readjust. What would you pay for, say, a reasonable DDR4 16GB (2x8GB) at 2333MHz kit?
I would only pay 239.99 CAD for a Kit of 2×16@3000mhz,,, thats it… also thats what I paid for my first kit and see no reason I should have to pay more then my original kit for the same memory
I am longing for a 128 GB DDR 4 RAM kit for some time. But the prices are prohibitive lately.
I hope, not only the prices go back down as much as possible, but also that new 256 GB kits (8×32 GB) DDR 4 are made available soom.
What an ugly time to be a PC builder… High RAM prices, crazy GPU prices, near-zero mid-class and high-end Radeon graphics cards availability … Luckily I bought a 16GB Corsair DDR4 kit (3200MHz) back at the end of September for a “reasonable” price of 150€ (200$ incl. 22% VAT here in Italy) and an RX Vega64 570€ (~700$).
I want to upgrade my CPU but right now the RAM would be more expensive than a R5 1600. So I’ll wait for cheaper RAM and spend the money I’d save on RAM on an R7 2700 instead.
Good choice. I have the R7 1700and will upgrade to the 2700 (more frequency is good, even if my 1700 is at 3.9GHz since the day I assembled my PC?
Let’s hope for better RAM prices in April when Ryzen 2/+ launches or I have to borrow some RAM until it gets reasonable priced, my 3570k is really slowing down my GPU.
In theory this year RAM prices won’t go much higher than 2017, since I’ve heard that samsung and SK Hynix are doing everything they can for increasing DDR4 production. Still, I remember good old days that you could buy 16GB DDR4 for only 110€…
yeah, got 2x8GB 3000MHz RAM in summer 2016 for about 95€ and 8GB 2400MHz for 55€. It’s nice if prices won’t go up any more but a decrease is mostly needed
Citing Reuters articel:
“While the NAND flash market may soften somewhat, the DRAM memory chip market, which is about $20 billion bigger than the NAND industry, is seen as much tighter. Prices are expected to gain nearly 9 percent because of a severe supply shortage.
With DRAM manufacturers’ rushing to ramp up production – they are likely to nearly quadruple capital spending for 2017 and 2018 combined to $38 billion from 2016’s $10 billion – prices may decline as much as 18 percent next year, according to Nomura.”
Well… it says the price of DRAM will go up 9% and that they will drop in 2019.