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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Jacob Fox

Looks like the AI boom has made DDR4 RAM no better value than DDR5 as storage and memory prices continue to rise

Memory Ray Wang
A photo of a 128 GB Crucial DDR5-6400 CUDIMM kit.

I'm sure we have plenty to actually thank AI for, but DDR4 pricing isn't one of those things. For a long time, DDR4 RAM was cheap enough to be worth consideration if you were looking to build a budget gaming PC. But judging from some recent charts shared by semiconductor analyst Ray Wang, DDR4 pricing is now so expensive it's hardly worth it compared to DDR5, even with DDR5 pricing having increased.

There's no source given for these charts, but it tracks with other analysis and even consumer tracking such as on pcpartpicker.com, and Wang is a reliable industry analyst. The AI boom (or bubble) has most certainly played a big part in this, because AI datacentres require tons of DRAM for stacks of high bandwidth memory (HBM).

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