Was there a mining run on DDR4 memory also? PCGamer is listing this LPX Vengeance kit as one of the best deals today, and it’s nearly double the price of what I paid in June.
heres the sale link. $160 seems pretty steep.
I don’t know about you guys in the states. But here in the uk, black friday has been a bit of a joke.
I thought the premise of black friday was discounted old stock.
I have been price checking items from a popular electrical goods chain famous for black friday to find they re pulling tricks like hiking up the price on the tag by £100 and sticking a big discount label on it. Its still the same price as it was in store months ago.
Same with big online retailers
Novelty has worn off on me for black friday.
4 Likes
There are deals, but they are not easy to find.
RAM prices have zero to do with mining and everything to do with scarcity. Put simply, the same fabs that make RAM (DDR and GDDR) also make NAND flash used in things like SSDs and tablets and phones. There aren’t enough to meet the demand.
Normally, when supply is scarce, companies add capacity. Either a company that already makes it increases their output or a new company pops up. The problem is–this stuff requires expensive tooling. So it would cost hundreds of millions (or even billions) to open a new fab that can do this stuff, and then it takes years and years to recoup those costs and make a profit. Assuming that the price doesn’t drop, if demand softens or supply increases too fast.
So…companies already operating at decent margins at best, thin margins or less at worst, risk blowing them by making a huge capital investment that they may never recoup the cost of (or at least not in a timeframe the stockholders find acceptable, since nowadays stockholders don’t buy stock in a company they feel will make them money, they buy the stock and demand a say in guiding the company to make them the money they feel they deserve).
TL; DR version the companies building the chips don’t want to risk investing in making more capacity and the barrier to entry for a new player is too steep. Prices will have to get much higher first to make that happen.