Conclusion
The question of “too expensive” is always relative to two things: the ease at which money comes to you and your need for the next bigger thing. If you need to cross the ocean in a day, the price of an airline ticket certainly isn’t “too expensive” when compared to the price of a boat ride.
At $1600, Corsair’s 128GB Vengeance LPX memory kit costs more than twice that of two 64GB kits. On the other hand, its price has fallen by nearly 20% in the past 3 weeks. Furthermore, it’s not actually possible to install two 64GB kits on a desktop motherboard, because each of those kits also has eight modules. While we expect the price to eventually approach parity, this will only happen as the volume of 8GB (32Gb) DDR4 ICs reaches market saturation. Our sources at Micron expect this to occur in early July, whereupon we expect to see a massive launch of four-DIMM 64GB kits.
The various capacities of comparison kits make it important to consider price-per-gigabyte instead of simple price, and it’s easier to compare calculated results rather than to ask you to double the number in your head with every doubling of capacity. Prices and capacities are both converted to percent-of-average (for all four kits) before dividing capacity by price.
Corsair’s 128GB kit shows a 92%-of-average value, when 100% is the average of all four kits. That 8% “value loss” is the price early adopters pay to get the latest thing, and will continue to pay until the price of an 8GB IC drops to the price of two 4GB ICs. And by then, most motherboard manufacturers will probably have compatible firmware.
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Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware, covering Cases, Cooling, Memory and Motherboards. Follow him onTwitter.
