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Did another factory burn down????

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by fungus-among-us

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WOW! Has anyone else noticed that DDR and DDR2 prices have jumped quite a bit (50%) over the last month?

I find it disheartening that on all computer hardware fronts, that once a product (videocard, audiocard, harddrive, etc...) has been released, the price usually starts to drop... and very rarely creeps back up. Memory has never been this way... even back in the days of the SIMMs.

Guess this will delay my Conroe build.

Edit: I can see it already.... supply and demand, simple economics. IC manufacturers are the new Oil companies... Bush needs to invade Taiwan to lower IC prices (LOL)

6 replies

by old guy

last week to join in on the class action law suit over this. Somehow, though, it wound up in the round file.

by jamesrl

I remember the great ram shortage of '88, that was a doozy. We ended up stripping our demo machines to sell to anxious customers. RAM doubled in price in a short few weeks. The shortage went on longer than we thought.

RAM for older machines does go up as the supply goes down. My company has sold IBM servers for a long time and I honestly could have bought a whole used server(refurbished with a one year warranty) and replaced an existing server faster and cheaper than sourcing a RAM upgrade (not stocked in Canada, 2 weeks to get it from the states). In the example, the server at the store was $199 and had 512MB of RAM, whereas the RAM (only made by IBM and Kingston) would have cost me $325.

James

by fungus-among-us

hehehe, I too remember those days. Had an online friend that was going to the Dayton "Hamfest" (it was more computers than Ham radios, but whatever). Memory prices at the time for 1MB SIMM was averaging $27.00 (the then current issue of ComputerShopper). When she got there, the cheapest 1MB SIMMs available were listed at $41.00 (and these were the "value" generic brands)! I called a few vendors that advertised in ComputerShopper and they verified the price hikes. I passed on the RAM but ended up splitting a box of 2000 (yes TWO Thousand) unformatted HD 3-1/2" floppy disks (that had John Deere Logos on them). After formatting, over 700 of the 1000 disks I had would not format at HD levels and I had to format at 720K! Bummer.

I completely understand the economics of supply and demand. From what I've heard (and none of this is substantiated), memory manufactures (not the IC makers), assembled a BUTTLOAD of DDR2 modules expecting AM2 and Core2Duo early adopters to make a mad purchasing frenzy. Due to the lack of wide availability (conroe), DDR2 sales weren't as expected (high supply low demand). Since DDR is being "Phased out" I can well understand that the supply side of DDR is dwindling fast. But what it all seems like to me, it PRICE gouging.
Well... I'm going to hold off any major system upgrades that require DDR2... probably until DDR3 is the "new" kid on the block.

Maybe G.W.B. needs to invade Taiwan and get those prices down.

by stress junkie

My old 486/DX machines cost more to build than a nice desktop computer today, mostly due to the cost of RAM. It didn't matter if the motherboard's BIOS could only handle 16MB because you couldn't afford to buy that much RAM.

And I had to walk five miles to school in my bare feet. :D

by jdclyde

It was amazing that you could get a whole meg for only $50! A huge card that you would have to plug all the chips in yourself!

Anyone remember trouble shooting these? Error code would tell you row and collum, so you would replace that one chip.......

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