Whose idea was it to hike up the RAM prices?

What's the big idea with having Kingston Hyper X 3200 2x512 kits at $250-$300? A few months ago they were only $200 for a 3000 kit and $238 for a 3200 kit. What's the big idea? Aren't there any cheaper places than Newegg and Zipzoomfly, or is this the end of the BH5 era and the beginning of the hynix and other chips (adata I think it was?) ?
It seems that the only remnants are the PC3000 KHX@212 a GB and that's not even reliable as to if it's BH5. So simply put, did all DDR400 go up in price? Or just the Kingston HyperX? (the prices change so often online, it's impossible for the BH5 thread to keep up.)

It's just a matter of supply and demand. When there was a glut of good RAM being produced, the prices got dropped so they could get rid of their stock and bring some cash back to pay for businss expenses.

You just have to look at the bigger picture when you build your systems. Over all, it's still incredible how much computing power you can construct for less than $500 these days. I still remember when a 286XT DOS box was going for over $2k only 15 years ago.

Also less good RAM is better than a lot of cheap RAM. 2x256 dual channel works great for XP & gaming. You don't need 2x512 unless you're dealing with huge files like file serving, video encoding, 3D rendering or PhotoShop work.

Audioaficionado said:

I still remember when a 286XT DOS box was going for over $2k only 15 years ago.

Click to expand...

Ah the good ol' day's. I still have mine in my parents basement.

Prices of Ram have been going up for a long time. About 3 or 4 years ago there was that earth quake in china that made ram sky rocket. After all the factories were rebuilt tons of ram was made to fill the need for it. They produced too much and ram got insanly cheap. This was back when you could buy a gig of pc 133 ram for less then a 100 dollars. Because ram was so cheap companies signed an agreement with each other to sell ram at higher prices regardless of supply. Thats why ram got so expensive again. And since then Ram has been expensive because of that stupid agreement. Despite what people may think there is a very good suply of ram out there. Its just because of that agreement that ram is so expesnive. And of course it gets more expensive with the newer technology like the hyper-x ram and such.

I don't find ram to be expensive, in fact, I find computers as a whole to be INCREDIBLY cheap. Storage is at less than 1 DOLLAR a gig, and it gets cheaper as you go up to 250gigs.
512megs of Corsair VS can be had for less than $90, and that's pc3200, I remember when it was a great buy $80 for 256 megs, and that was RECENTLY.
I guess some of us have been building computers longer than others. =\

agreement to jack up price on ram? sound like an antritrust case
someone call the feds

ultimasailing said:

agreement to jack up price on ram? sound like an antritrust case
someone call the feds

Click to expand...

Asia is out of their juristriction

RAM prices are rising from a decrease in supply. RAM suppliers don't make much money on RAM, but they do on flash memory. Most memory suppliers have switched a large portion of their production over to flash, abandoning RAM. Less supply equals higher prices.

even if asia were in our juristriction, it wouldnt make sense to take them to court since well if the we did win and they would have to shut down, memory would get even more expensive. So let them be with their prices, they will go down again/

tom10167 said:

I don't find ram to be expensive, in fact, I find computers as a whole to be INCREDIBLY cheap. Storage is at less than 1 DOLLAR a gig, and it gets cheaper as you go up to 250gigs.
512megs of Corsair VS can be had for less than $90, and that's pc3200, I remember when it was a great buy $80 for 256 megs, and that was RECENTLY.
I guess some of us have been building computers longer than others. =\

Click to expand...

He is right, Ram is still relativly inexpensive.

Even though an agreement was filed to keep prices high, RAM is still pretty cheap. I remember back in the days of the orginal pentium when you had to buy two sticks of ram to fill one bank of ram. A dual stick set equallying 8 megs was close to 80 dollars. Back in the days of the 286 and 386 a 30 meg hardrive was close to a hundred dollars and more. When hardrives first came out they were closer to 300-400 dollars. And the same went for cd-rom drives. I remember when my dad first bought a 1x speed cd-rom drive when they first came out. The price was 259 dollars.

Generally computers are pretty cheap now. You can spend very little and get a lot of processor power. It was just 20 years ago universities were renting out computer time and charging per work cycle. Can you think of spending 10 cents per work cycle? That doesnt sound like much but with today's computing power you would easily rack up well over a million dollars in the first few minutes.

All in all ram isnt that expensive. It may seem like it to most members on here because they are young, still in school, have no job or very low paying jobs, and have not been around the computer scene for more then a few years. But all in all Ram is not that expensive. For goodness sakes, my graphics card has more ram on it and is physically faster then my computer did 6 years ago. And my graphics card costs 1/10 the price.