DRAM Prices at 22-Month Low, Start Buying

4GB of ram is good enough for me

RAM is very cheap on Newegg. It's about 50% than it was last year at this time. I'm talking about OCZ RAM, but I would pass on that brand. I've had lots of faulty DIMMs.

have 8Gb DDR 3 now, may go with 12Gb this year for my next build, 8 core bulldozer at 4Ghz/12Gb DDR3, Asus 6990 4Gb, 2560 x 1600 super ips panel via display port. Life is grand!

The lowest I saw DDR3 reach back in 2009 was about $55 for 4GB in August. Prices spiked afterwards, but it looks like someone messed up on their math somewhere, and there is just too much available now.

The prices today blow that out of the water. The last few machines I've built were easily able to fit 8~12GB of memory into the budget.

I think I'll stick with my 8GB, and wow production is cheap, they sell these things for 60x their value, I wonder if everything else does the same thing, maybe my 6850 only cost $10 to make?!

I hadn't checked on RAM prices for about 3 months since my build and I finally checked prices again on newegg about a week ago and was shocked. RAM that had cost me $90 three months ago was selling for $45. You get can 8GB of 1600MHz DDR3 for only about $100.

I'm actually tempted to upgrade my machine to 8GB because I've got a personal project I'm working on the requires processing a 17GB dataset and the extra RAM would be of some use.

Anything over 6gb is a complete waste. Anything over 3gb for gaming is a waste.

OK Bill Gates and no one needs more than 640k of RAM... *sigh*

I run 12GB in my system and 8GB in my old system. I can tell you running WoW as well as my browser with tons of Tabs open, IM, etc... that I routinely go over 5GB used. Sure, 12 may be overkill now, but i plan on keeping that machine for at least 4 years and I am sure to find apps and games that will utilize more RAM. Especially once we start seeing a lot more 64bit game clients.

With 15% promo code and $25 mail-in-rebate, I got 4GB for 28.54 shipped about a month ago. Now the price dropped $20, and with the current $15 MIR, it's still about $30 shipped. Don't see it getting much better than that without delving into the lower end stuff.

I remember back in August I bought my new machine, and I shelled out $85 for 2x2GB G.Skill DDR3, and that was the cheapest stuff they had on NewEgg. Now? That same kit I bought for $85 is under $40, and it's really pissing me off! Trust me folks, get your RAM now, while its dirt cheap!

Yeah it's a waste for most people, but who cares. Extra RAM isn't going to slow your computer down, and it's so dirt cheap there;s not much of a reason not to get a extra RAM. Besides the OS can use the extra RAM for the hard drive page cache which could give a slight performance boost for files that get accessed frequently, like say the browser cache.

Although if you're overclocking a CPU through increasing the BCLK then less RAM could be beneficial.

Now "they" just need to reduce the prices of SSD!!!

I think memory prices will still fall until demand picks up, like somewhere Back to school season and Thanksgiving.

I needed more than 6GB in my system. Try running computations Matlab, Mathematica, and AutoCAD with 6 or less.

If you actually think about it its only natural that ram prices drop like this... a few years back 2gb ram was very expensive. I think 8gb should be what 4gb was 2 years ago and that is reached now

I undestand some people need more than 6GB (or 4 in my case) but for MOST of the ppl getting 6+GB is useless since they use it for moderate gaming and facebook

When I only had 6GB I ran a small RAMDISK, and it was quite convenient. One DIMM died, and now I'm at 4GB.
Here's one person hoping we'll see some LGA 2011 consumer boards with 8 DIMMs (I want the extra memory, but don't want a server board). Who needs a SSD?

I'm still running with 2GB with Windows7. Guess I should order another 2GB... maybe 4.

ROFL at more than 6gb is a waste, I run Catia V5-R18 and I can honestly say, 128gb isnt enough, 1tb I could actually render a whole job with stress test but thats only if I use .158 inch, I heard of Ford using 2mm stress test, which would take 6.879tb of dram with proper scaling. Ram limitations hold back real workstations which is sad cuz they keep making cheap crappy 1-2-4gb sticks for dirt cheap.

I say start making 16gb sticks and stop losing money!!!!!!!!!

NEED MOAR RAM

Ram seems to be the lobster of the tech industry: 8GB | See Market Rate

I bought 4gb ddr3 1600 7-8-7 for $59, no need for more than that

arggh, i still don't have a ddr3 system. my ddr2 pc is maxed out.

i recommend buying what you can with RAM before buying into an SSD. a 64bit system win7 system can use most of your system memory anyway and avoids virtual memory use which is unnecessary wear on a hard disk.

The individual requirements differ from person to person but there are a few generic limitations.

For any NT x86 system (Windows 2000 / XP / Vista / 7 32-bit) your OS will use the last 512Mb to 1Gb of address space for HW address mapping leaving only 3.5 GB max for the system. No single application can have more then 2Gb allocated to it, this is because applications only get 31 bits to their address space, the 32nd bit is reserved as a separator between user memory space and kernel memory space. This is where the "no name needs more then 3Gb" comes from, any x86 game (damn near all of them) would be incapable of using more then 2Gb, and most likely never above 1.8Gb (anything more and you run the danger of getting a very bad unmaskable error and crashing your game). This would leave another 1Gb for the OS, which on a gaming PC striped of non-essential services should be enough.

With a x64 OS you could load up on more memory and have all sorts of browsers / applications open, but the x86 apps themselves each only have 2Gb of addressable space. If you run x64 applications / games (their starting to appear) then all those limitations go away and the game can crunch down on all that juicy system memory.

And to the commentator about how GFX drivers like to allocate system memory as a buffer region, just because its allocated doesn't mean its being used. And if anything ~is~ being thrown into there, then either your game (most likely) or your GFX driver has a serious issue it needs to address. GART memory is ~very~ slow, thing IGP level slow and is a left over addressing method from the days when "budget" cards at 16~32Mb of dedicated memory and would use system memory to augment themselves.

It also becomes a serious waste of space, a game would load textures from its resource files into the games memory space then transmit those textures to the GFX driver to be loaded into texture memory. The game tries to keep a copy of the texture inside its own memory space so that it can quickly reload its state should it lose focus on the primary display (alt-tab). Keeping a copy of the texture in system memory is just wasting space as a copy already exists inside the games memory and can be transmitted from the game to the GPU just as fast as from GART to the GPU. The only time GART should be used is if the game isn't smart enough to maintain / manage its own textures, I could see this happening with DX7/8 titles, but not with DX10/11 ones.