A computing enthusiast has shared images of a fat stack of DDR4 RAM sticks that they found at home. VastOption8705 told other tech fans on Reddit that they “found 10k worth of RAM sitting in my garage.” We count 30 sticks of DDR4-2666, and three sticks shown separately are all 64GB modules. If they are all 64GB modules, that number of sticks would add up to 1,920GB of RAM…

How did this huge amount of RAM end up in VastOption8705’s garage? The story goes that the Redditor was allowed to keep an old server from their workplace. Such 'generosity' isn’t unheard of, and it might have actually saved the company some recycling fees.

Is server DDR4 useful?

Numerous comments on the Reddit post jokingly pitch for RAM stick donations. But they might be barking up the wrong tree. Looking more closely at the sticks, where the labels are clearly readable, reveals that they are Samsung 64GB DDR4 ECC registered DIMMs (RDIMMs).

These kinds of RAM sticks are commonly used in servers built around Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or AMD Threadripper platforms. Sadly for their market value and the folks on Reddit hoping for some spare RAM, they aren’t consumer PC friendly. Even if you have a DDR4-supporting motherboard, these ECC RDIMMs will be both physically and electrically incompatible with your home creator/gaming PC.

Pricing and the Australia question

A quick poke around eBay U.S. listings shows that a single 64GB DDR4-2666 stick like those shown can be bought for between $350 and $425. So, we could roughly value the 30 sticks at $12,000 if a price of $400 per stick were achieved. The OP’s touted $10K valuation wasn’t far off. But if VastOption8705 lives in Australia, as they seem to, and guesstimated the value in Australian dollars, AU$10,000 currently equates to ~US$7,200 – quite low.

If you have spare RAM in your garage, don't share your address on public forums. The best I could find is a pair of 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs in my drawer. I also had some 30-pin SIMMs, SDRAM, PowerMac ROMs, and DDR3 modules probably worth just pennies, despite the RAMpocalypse.

Earlier this year, V-Color announced its 1+1 DDR5 filler memory kits to help suspend disbelief and offer psychological salvation against rising memory prices. These kits mix real DDR5 sticks with dummy modules that don't actually have any RAM inside — just working RGB — to give you the illusion of a fully-slotted motherboard. Today, the kit is finally available to buy in the UK and Europe, with just the filler sticks on their own also listed for sale in North America.

V-Color has two different DDR5 products: Manta XSky and Manta XFinity, the latter being the higher-end model. The 1+1 kit is only available for the Manta XSky variant and only in the UK and Germany; not yet in the US. The 0GB kits (where both sticks are dummies) are available in both the Manta XSky and XFinity models across multiple regions. Pricing starts from $43 and goes up to almost $300, so let's break it all down.

In the UK, Overclockers currently has the 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL30 kit listed for 210 GBP, or $285, in black and white colorways. You get a single 16GB stick with those specs and a filler module to occupy two slots on your motherboard. There's a slightly more expensive 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL28 kit as well, selling for 219 GBP, or $297. Once again, you can choose either the black or white color, and you get 1 real stick of RAM and one filler.

• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C30 6,000MHz - Black
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C30 6,000MHz - White
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C28 6,000MHz - Black
• V-Color (1+1) Manta XSky RGB 16GB C28 6,000MHz - White

In Europe, using Geizhals, we were only able to find one in-stock listing of the 16GB 6,000 MT/s CL28 kit for 330 Euros, or $384, in the black colorway. The same kit with CL30 speeds can be had for 220 Euros, or $256, but it's out of stock on CaseKing, the one Germany-based store in the entire EU with these products. We'll remind readers that there are no North America listings for V-Color's 1+1 DDR5 kits as of now.

But we did spot plenty of 0GB kits on Newegg and Amazon. These kits don't offer any real RAM whatsoever and are purely meant for decorative purposes. You can only use these if you already have working RAM in your system and two extra slots left to populate on your motherboard. Amazon has the Manta XFinity variant listed for $57 in either black or white, while Newegg is selling the Manta XSky model for $44 in white.

• V-Color Manta XFinity DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - Black (Amazon)
• V-Color Manta XFinity DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - White (Amazon)
• V-Color Manta XSky DDR5 RGB Filler Solution - White (Newegg)

CaseKing in Germany is selling the Manta XSky filler kit for 50 Euros, or $58, but we weren't able to find any other listing across Europe. The prices for these kits across the world are not much higher than their regular, non-filler counterparts, so you might as well spring for these until the RAMpocalypse settles down. Just don't forget that you'd still be limited to single-channel memory with the 1+1 kits, which isn't that big of a deal when it comes to DDR5, especially if you have an X3D CPU.

The saga involving Chinese DRAM maker CXMT's alleged theft of Samsung's trade secrets is going strong. The South Korean court case already includes multiple convictions, two of which carry prison sentences for ex-Samsung engineers. The latest chapter is a doozy, though. Korean publication NoCut News spilled the chips on Project Hefei, a purported CXMT roadmap outlining long-term planning about said technology "acquisitions," personnel poaching, and production tape-out — all key pieces that may have directly led to CXMT's ascension to 10% of the global DRAM market.

According to leaked court documents, the prosecution says that Project Hefei was CXMT's entire DRAM development plan and was spearheaded by the firm's head of development (formerly Samsung's DRAM development lead), around August 2016 — not much longer after CXMT itself was created in June 2016.

In brief, the purported plan was to nab Samsung's Process Recipe Plan (PRP) by September 2016, poach key Samsung engineers by October 2016, have R&D complete in July 2017, and start making DRAM wafers by August 2018 at a rate of 10,000 a month. NoCut says the PRP dataset comprises 620 steps in DRAM manufacturing and includes data on equipment, consumables, and production methods.

The report states that in August 2016, CXMT first attempted to make wafers of 18nm chips by relying on the collective memories of the Samsung engineers it had hired away. Those recollections apparently proved insufficient, so after allegedly gaining illicit access to Samsung's PRP, CXMT prepared its own document in September 2016. The leaked data even included specific equipment suppliers and model numbers.

CXMT's "new" PRP was then handed out to key specialists, many of them ex-Samsung engineers, whom the prosecution says ought to have immediately recognized the data as originating from the Korean firm. The document apparently included notation and notes on process developments that were all unique to Samsung. A convicted ex-Samsung researcher with the surname Jeon, previously sentenced to 7 years in prison for manually copying parts of the PRP before leaving for CXMT, testified in this case as a witness.

The whole CXMT debacle has been playing out in South Korean courtrooms since January 2024 and is arguably far bigger than just "a company stole some tech from another." A decade ago, most of the DRAM market was taken by the Big Three: Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix. CXMT was created in June 2016 in Hefei (hence the project name), with a modest government investment of around $1.9 billion USD, allegedly with no R&D facilities whatsoever or any plan for research.

Going from zero facilities and institutional expertise to DRAM wafer production in little over two years would be an unprecedented feat, and presumably nigh impossible without the alleged IP theft; getting just the memory fab up and running usually takes two to four years, let alone any time for research. The firm claimed in 2019 that it designed its then-new 8 Gb DDR4 chips entirely in-house as a "leapfrog, independent" technology and began selling DRAM chips locally.

Then the AI locusts charged in and ate every chip on the planet. This demand resulted in explosive growth for CXMT, from an estimated 4% of the global DRAM market in Q2 2025 to around 10% in Q2 2016, marking the first time in over a decade that the Big Three held less than 90% of the pie.

Production capacity expanded to three 12" wafer fabrication facilities, expected to churn out a collective 350,000 wafers until the year is done — close to the same figure that Micron produces, of 375,000 to 385,000. CXMT is also planning to open a second fab in Beijing, aiming to produce over 600,000 wafers per month once it's online.

Furthermore, CXMT's gains aren't coming just from its DRAM market share. Revenue grew 716% in Q2 2026 alone, and its IPO on the Shanghai STAR Market in July 2026 saw its stock climb 466%, netting the firm a cool $8.6 billion USD and making it the most valuable chipmaker in the Chinese stock market.

About 70% of that money is reportedly going towards further expansion of DRAM production, rather than pricier, more complicated HBM. However, the firm has supplied HBM3E samples to Alibaba's T-Head and Cambricon, even as Samsung and SK hynix enter HBM4 production.

As of the South Korean prosecution's last tally in December 2025, Samsung's damages due to CXMT's alleged machinations ascended to "at least tens of trillions of won." A back-of-the-envelope extrapolation, considering quite a while has passed, might suggest a figure in the range of ₩40 trillion, or $29.5 billion, and rising exponentially.

The lasting impact on the memory market and technology in general is going well beyond plain number descriptors, though. All things considered, if the allegations are true, then CXMT's machinations resulted in a geopolitical-scale economic event. Dr. Evil would be proud.

The goal of next-generation HBM5 memory specification is to double performance and increase power efficiency compared to HBM4E, Samsung announced at the 'Memory Executive Summit,' an event that precedes 'Semicon Taiwan 2026.' Considering that it is barely realistic to double the data transfer rate of HBM4E in just one generation, the comment made by Samsung may imply that HBM5 will double the number of interface pins to boost bandwidth.

The goal of HBM5, which is currently under development, is to double the performance and improve the performance per watt by 20% compared to the HBM4E generation, according to Choi Jang-seok, the head of the product planning team of the memory business department of Samsung Electronics DS division. Previously, Samsung announced that its HBM5 memory stacks will feature a heat path block (HPB), which will reduce thermal resistance by 20% and simplify cooling of HBM5 modules.

Doubling HBM5’s per-stack memory bandwidth would result in peak bandwidth of around 4 TB/s per stack already in 2028 – 2029. TSMC expects AI accelerators to get to 20 – 24 HBM5/HBM5E per package configurations by the end of the decade, which means that these systems-in-packages will get a whopping 80 TB/s – 96 TB of memory bandwidth just several years down the road.

Although both DRAM makers like Micron, Samsung, or SK hynix as well as developers of HBM controllers and PHYs like Cadence, Rambus, or Synopsys already offer HBM4/HBM4E controllers and interfaces rated for 16 GT/s data transfer rates, the official JEDEC transfer rate for HBM4E will be around 12 GT/s.

If Samsung expects HBM5 to deliver twice the bandwidth of HBM4E, the HBM5 specification must either double the per-pin data transfer rate from 12 GT/s to 24 GT/s, double the interface width from 2,048 to 4,096 bits, or combine a wider interface with a higher data transfer rate. Increasing HBM5 memory stack interface width to 4,096 bits has so far been envisioned by KAIST and Marvell; however, this is certainly not an even semi-official confirmation of the specification's target.

From a performance-per-watt perspective*, widening the interface is generally easier than doubling the per-pin signaling rate. Higher per-pin speeds require faster drivers, receivers, clocks, equalization, tighter timing margins, and a more sophisticated PHY since maintaining signaling integrity at speeds well beyond 20 GT/s is not easy. But while a wider HBM interface moves more bits in parallel at a lower speed per wire, going from 2,048 to 4,096 pins means twice as many TSV/I/O paths, drivers, receivers, bumps, more complicated routing, and extremely complicated base die. So while a 4,096 I/O at moderate speed is probably best for pJ/bit, the interface/package complexity gets so extreme that it may offset the gains. Furthermore, such a wide interface Perhaps a 3,072-bit interface combined with a moderate increase in data transfer rate would be a reasonable engineering compromise, though engineers involved in JEDEC’s decision-making process may think otherwise. In any case, for now, any discussion of HBM5 specifications remains speculative.

Nonetheless, the target to double the bandwidth of HBM4E (2 TB/s per stack) within one generation is clearly a very aggressive one.

*It should be noted that achieving a 20% higher energy efficiency can be achieved not only by increasing performance, but by improving DRAM process technology, optimizing base die, lowering TSV I/O voltages, architectural changes, or power management.

China's DRAM champion ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has started risk production of HBM3E memory, The Information reports. Although CXMT remains a generation behind the big three memory manufacturers, which are mass producing HBM4, it goes without saying that reaching the HBM3E milestone highlights the company's rapid technological progress.

Specifications of CXMT's HBM3E products are unknown, though keeping in mind that we are dealing with risk production, specifications of actual HBM3E products from CXMT may differ from risk production samples. Meanwhile, general JEDEC specifications are well known: HBM3E modules feature a 1,024-bit-wide memory interface, supports data transfer rates up to 9.6 GT/s per pin, and can stack 8 or 12 memory devices. Depending on the exact speed bins, HBM3E can provide up to 1.228 TB/s of memory bandwidth.

Capacity of actual memory stacks depends on the number of DRAM dies used in that stack: HBM3E products can offer 24GB of capacity using an eight-die stack or 36GB using a 12-die stack when built with 24Gb DRAM devices.

Several Chinese developers of advanced processors are already evaluating CXMT's HBM3E with their processors, including Alibaba Group's T-Head and Cambricon Technologies, according to the report. If testing and qualification proceed as planned, these companies could begin using CXMT's HBM3E in commercial products as early as next year.

Since every HBM package requires multiple large DRAM dies, growing HBM output could consume considerable DRAM manufacturing capacity, which is when CXMT's aggressive capacity expansion will be useful.

CXMT's manufacturing of HBM3E is important for multiple reasons and arguably the HBM3E generation itself matters less than CXMT's ability to manufacture usable HBM at all.

Firstly, HBM is one of the critical components of modern AI accelerators, so if CXMT's HBM3E qualifies with processors from Cambricon, T-Head, and other Chinese designers, China becomes less dependent on Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix for building high-performance AI hardware.

Secondly, despite being a generation behind HBM4, HBM3E is still very capable memory and can provide several TB/s of bandwidth, sufficient for powerful AI accelerators. In fact, many Chinese developers of AI accelerators do not necessarily need HBM4/HBM4E to build useful AI systems.

Thirdly, HBM is substantially harder than making ordinary DRAM. CXMT needs not only competitive DRAM dies, but also high-yield stacking, through silicon vias (TSVs), very fine interconnects, thermal management, packaging, and testing. Reaching HBM3E risk production proves that China's memory ecosystem is advancing beyond simply manufacturing commodity DRAM.

Finally, there is also an important geopolitical angle. Export restrictions constrain China's access to advanced AI processors and HBM, so a combination of Chinese-designed accelerators, CXMT HBM3E, and advanced domestic packaging indicates that China becomes one step closer to semiconductor self-sufficiency.

G.Skill, which makes some of the best RAM on the market, has announced the Flare X5X series of DDR5 memory kits. Like the Trident Z5 NeoX, the new Flare X5X leverages AMD's EXPO ULL (Ultra Low Latency) technology, which features optimized memory subtimings to maximize performance on Ryzen processors, especially those without 3D V-Cache.

G.Skill offers a plethora of different DDR5-6000 memory kits across its Trident, Ripjaws, and Flare lineups. It also offers variations that specifically cater to Intel and AMD processors. Historically, the Flare series targets AMD platforms.

The Flare X5X will initially launch at DDR5-6000, since many consider it the sweet spot for AMD's Ryzen chips. Like the other offerings, the Flare X5X debuts with a 32GB memory kit, made up of two 16GB memory modules.

As with any AMD EXPO ULL memory kit, it is difficult to tell the Flare X5X apart from the vanilla Flare X5 since we are not accustomed to listing specifications beyond the main memory timings. In the case of the Flare X5X, the memory kit has its timings configured to 36-36-36-96 at 1.35V, the same as the normal Flare X5 memory kit. The memory subtimings are tighter on the Flare X5X because of AMD EXPO ULL.

G.Skill Flare X5X Specifications

With memory timings of 36-36-36-96, the Flare X5X is not the best AMD EXPO ULL memory kit G.Skill offers. The company sells more optimized variants, including 26-36-36-32, 28-36-36-32, and 30-38-38-32 at 1.45V, 1.40V, and 1.35V, respectively. It is plausible that G.Skill will offer similar configurations for the Flare X5X down the line.

When AMD first announced it, the chipmaker confirmed that EXPO ULL memory kits would be priced similarly to regular EXPO memory kits. However, because of the memory shortage and leftover stock, the price difference was substantial. Pricing for AMD EXPO ULL memory kits has somewhat stabilized over the last few months, so the price tags are falling in line with what AMD anticipated.

G.Skill has not shared the pricing for the Flare X5X DDR5-6000 C36 32GB (2x16GB) memory kit. However, we should have a pretty good idea of what it will retail for by looking at G.Skill's other memory kits on the market. For instance, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C36, a less optimized version of the C30 version we have reviewed, sells for $10 more than the normal Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-6000 C36. In a perfect world, the Flare X5X DDR5-6000 C36 may sell for around $509.99, $10 above the standard Flare X5 DDR5-6000 C36.

G.Skill will roll out the Flare X5X series in phases so that availability will vary by region. It should not be long before we find the Flare X5X DDR5-6000 C36 memory kit at all major U.S. retailers.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has announced in a social media post that it has started mass production of LPDDR6 memory for a Xiaomi smartphone, Reuters reports. This is not entirely unexpected given the general LPDDR6 mass-production timeline, but the announcement is still surprising because two China-based companies are ahead of industry announcements. Yet, there are caveats.

LPDDR6 is perhaps the most substantial upgrade to the GDDR-class memory ever. Firstly, it uses PAM3 signaling, which encodes 3 bits of information across two symbols, compared with the NRZ signaling used by LPDDR5/LPDDR5X. Second, the data transfer rate increases to 43.2 GT/s. Third, the reduced I/O width from 32 bits to 24 bits requires rework at both the hardware and software levels.

Given the differences between LPDDR5 and LPDDR6, the most important factor here is not exactly LPDDR6 manufacturing, but a broader view.

On the one hand, CXMT reached mass production of LPDDR6 roughly at the same time as the established DRAM leaders, meaning it is on par with them, if not ahead. This marks a substantial change from earlier generations, when Chinese DRAM technology generally lagged considerably behind Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron.

On the other hand, reaching mass production does not necessarily mean that CXMT has achieved full technological or manufacturing parity with its larger rivals. The official announcement covers only one smartphone maker and one model, meaning CXMT's LPDD6 still has to pass validation for other handsets and other makers.

Still, the significance of CXMT's announcement is hard to understate. CXMT is no longer merely catching up by introducing a new memory generation years after its international competitors. With LPDDR6, CXMT is entering the market during the standard's initial commercialization, which means the technology gap between China's leading DRAM producer and the industry's established players has narrowed considerably.

Which brings us to the question of whether CXMT can maintain this pace. Developing a competitive LPDDR6 device is one thing, producing it at high yields and in sufficient volumes to supply major customers is another. For now, we are talking about a niche smartphone with memory operating at undisclosed performance.

If CXMT can mass-produce LPDDR6 for the whole market and manufacturers, we may well have seen the change of the industry leader. Yet, given one niche device, we certainly cannot say so for now.

China's leading DRAM producer ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense in an attempt to overturn its classification as a company linked to China's military, Reuters reports. CXMT claims that it has no connection to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and argues that the Pentagon's decision lacks supporting evidence, violated due-process requirements, and has damaged both its business and reputation.

The Pentagon initially classified CXMT as a Chinese military company in January 2025, when Joe Biden was the president. The Trump administration subsequently maintained the designation when the Defense Department updated the list in June. CXMT says it spent more than a year supplying information to the Defense Department in an attempt to overturn the classification and remove itself from the list.

The company claims the DoD published a notice in February indicating that CXMT would be taken off the list but withdrew that notice later the same day without any explanation. In June, the Pentagon classified CXMT as 'directly affiliated with MIIT and indirectly affiliated with SASAC and MIIT.' MIIT is China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, whereas SASAC is the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, an organization that formally owns the government's stakes in non-financial state-owned enterprises.

While CXMT memory can certainly be found in systems used by the PLA or China's secret services, this does not automatically make CXMT a direct supplier to these entities and therefore does not prove that CXMT is a Chinese military company.

CXMT points out the Pentagon's original motivation to include the DRAM maker in its list was a remarkably weak-looking 'military grade' argument. According to the complaint, DoD's 2024 report said CXMT contributed to China's defense industrial base partly because its DRAM is dual-use and cited an advertisement describing CXMT products as 'military grade.' CXMT says that advertisement came from an unauthorized distributor, which later admitted the characterization was erroneous.

In addition, CXMT claims that its DRAM products conform to JEDEC commercial standards and lack the requirements imposed on Chinese military-grade semiconductor components involving areas such as temperature, packaging, testing, and military oversight. Also, it says that should its products be made in the U.S., they would be classified as for 'purely civilian uses' and that it 'does not hold any licenses to manufacture products for military use.'

Inclusion on the Pentagon's list of companies linked to the Chinese military can result in restrictions involving U.S. government contracts, something that CXMT barely seeks. But more importantly, it can affect a company's commercial relationships (as many companies do not want to be affiliated with companies linked to the Chinese military) and reputation. Indeed, CXMT claims that since January 2025 the designation has continuously hurt it commercially and reputationally, and that the lawsuit is intended to protect its business interests.

The ongoing DRAM crisis has led to a sharp increase in laptop prices, with manufacturers facing exponentially high component costs, particularly memory and SSDs. The situation has created a growing gap in the affordable gaming laptop segment, with most entry-level models becoming increasingly expensive. In its response, MSI has introduced the new Katana 15 HX C14 that features Intel’s 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh processors along with support for both DDR5 and DDR4-3200 memory.

Depending on the region, MSI will be offering the value-focused gaming laptop in two variants, featuring dual SO-DIMM slots with either DDR4 or DDR5 compatibility. For context, a 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM memory kit can be purchased for around $200, while a DDR5-6000 kit goes for over $400. MSI did not specify the DDR4 capacity as standard, only that the laptop supports up to 96GB, which seems unlikely given no 48GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs exist.

Configurable with up to a 24-core Intel Core i9-14900HX processor, the laptop should offer plenty of CPU performance for demanding tasks besides gaming. It will be available with up to an Nvidia RTX 5070 laptop GPU offering support for the latest AI features, GDDR7 memory, DLSS 4.5, and real-time ray tracing. MSI claims that the Katana 15 HX C14 is tuned for up to 170W of combined CPU and GPU power, while the cooling system with dual fans, three heat pipes, and four exhaust outlets helps in sustained performance. There are also dual-PCIe Gen 4x4 M.2 slots, allowing gamers to add a separate SSD dedicated to their gaming library.

Display options include a 15.6-inch IPS panel available with either QHD (2560x1440) resolution that supports up to a 165 Hz refresh rate or FHD (1920x1080) resolution with up to a 144 Hz refresh rate. In terms of design, the laptop comes in a stealthy black finish with textured slash patterns inspired by traditional Japanese blades along with bright red logos. The chassis measures 22.9mm in terms of thickness and weighs 4.62 pounds, making it fairly compact for a 15-inch gaming notebook.

Other notable features include support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4, a 4-Zone RGB gaming keyboard with 1.7mm key travel, a 240W power adapter, USB Type-C with Power Delivery 3.0, a 60Whr battery, and DTS-enhanced dual 2W speakers. According to MSI, the new Katana 15 HX C14 will be available globally, although there's no pricing information at the moment.

Cloudflare says that it has freed up roughly 100TB of RAM across its global fleet without reconfiguring any physical RAM modules in its servers, and that it did so by redesigning how each DNS cache entry is laid out in memory. In a technical blog post, systems engineer Sebastiaan Neuteboom gave us an in-depth look at five Rust-level changes to Big Pineapple, the platform behind the 1.1.1.1 resolver, that shrank each cached entry from 953 bytes to 420 bytes and made the cache faster in the process, with insert throughput up 43% and lookup latency down 19%. The recovered memory matches the combined DDR5 in 130 of Cloudflare's 768GB Gen 13 servers, reclaimed in the face of server-grade DDR5 prices that are on track to double year over year.

Just one wasted byte per entry costs Cloudflare more than 250GB of fleet memory, which is a consequence of Big Pineapple holding more than “250 billion cached DNS entries at any given time.” The first of the five changes, replacing Rust's growable Vec and String containers with fixed-size boxed slices, saved over 15TB on its own by dropping capacity fields the data never uses once cached.

Further changes collapsed the three record lists in every DNS response into one buffer indexed by 2-byte offsets, and dropped owner names that duplicate the queried domain, rebuilding them at read time instead. The last change stores record data as length-prefixed raw wire-format bytes, ending an arrangement in which a 4-byte A record took up the same 144 bytes as the largest record type Cloudflare caches, the rarely seen NAPTR.

Packing record data contiguously also improved CPU cache locality, meaning that most record types now copy straight from the stored buffer into outgoing responses instead of being re-serialized field by field.

According to Cloudflare’s benchmarks in the technical blog, insert throughput is now 893,000 entries per second, up from 625,000, with lookup latency down from 828 to 670 nanoseconds. Over the rollout, which ran from mid-May to early July, p99 resident memory per instance fell from 9.3GB to 5.3GB.

The Gen 13 servers, which Cloudflare calls its most powerful yet, each carry 768GB of DDR5-6400. The company settled on that config back in March after pricing out a 1,152GB option and rejecting it partly because of high memory prices.

This DNS cache work is the second large memory-reclamation project Cloudflare has completed in the last year, following the FL2 rewrite of its request-handling layer in Rust last September. Efficiency has been driving the company’s hardware picks for years, including the switch to AMD's 96-core EPYC 9684X for its Gen 12 servers.

None of the liberated RAM will be cashed out as smaller memory configurations, though; Cloudflare plans to pour it back into larger DNS caches, which raise hit rates and cut the query traffic it sends upstream to authoritative servers.

High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is one of the key components of AI systems that is not currently assembled in the U.S., but this is going to change in 2029, when SK hynix initiates packaging of HBM memory modules at its facility in Indiana. This week, the company held a groundbreaking ceremony for its HBM production base in America and intends to start construction of the plant shortly.

SK hynix's HBM production site in West Lafayette, Indiana, will specialize in advanced packaging, testing, and R&D of HBM. The facility is set to cost the company around $4 billion, which highlights its advanced technology capabilities as well as vast capacity. The DRAM maker expects to open the cleanroom by October 2028 and begin volume production of next-generation HBM in the second half of 2029, which is about a year later than originally envisioned. Once commercial operations kick off, SK hynix expects the Indiana site to employ around 1,000 people.

Despite being described as an HBM production base, the Indiana site will not manufacture the DRAM wafers, but will package HBM stacks using DRAM wafers produced in South Korea and base dies produced in South Korea, Taiwan, or the U.S. Nonetheless, SK hynix intends to market the resulting devices as its first U.S.-made next-generation HBM products. Meanwhile, as custom HBM-class memory gains traction in the second half of the decade, assembling such stacks close to American customers may be particularly important both for SK hynix and its clients, as it enables SK hynix to shrink the feedback loop significantly.

In addition to building the advanced packaging and testing plant, SK hynix will also establish an Advanced Packaging R&D Testbed next to the manufacturing lines. The facility will enable SK hynix to work with customers, universities, and commercial partners on future packaging technologies, build prototypes, and quickly validate their performance and manufacturability in an actual production environment. In the era of customized HBM, such a facility could become a significant competitive advantage for SK hynix.

SK hynix also signed a memorandum of understanding with Purdue University to jointly research system integration and advanced packaging technologies, including HBM.

"The United States is the epicenter of AI innovation, bringing together premier customers, top-tier R&D capabilities, and partners and Indiana fab will become a gateway to deliver first Made in USA HBM products," said Kwak Noh-Jung, CEO of SK hynix. "We will expand our investments and collaboration in the U.S., grow together, and become the most trusted partner in shaping the future of AI in America."

Nvidia's NVLink Fusion program gives the company's partners the building blocks necessary to connect custom chips with the NVLink scale-up domain used to join many separate processors into a single coherent system like the Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale accelerator. Today, Nvidia is adding a new building block to that toolkit: NVHBM, a custom implementation of the high-bandwidth memory that underpins practically every AI accelerator in use today.

As Nvidia describes it, NVHBM is a custom HBM base die that promises higher bandwidth, lower power usage, and a smaller on-die footprint than traditional HBM4e. Nvidia says it's designed and validated with "leading memory vendors," so it promises custom silicon developers faster time-to-market than implementing commodity HBM from the ground up. But it's worth re-emphasizing that this isn't an HBM replacement. Instead, it's a new building block that Nvidia is only offering to its custom silicon partners.

Memory bandwidth is everything for AI accelerators, and NVHBM promises up to 30% higher bandwidth per stack than standard HBM4e. For memory-bandwidth-bound AI workloads, that higher bandwidth translates into higher throughput, such as a higher tokens-per-second rate for AI inference.

The custom NVHBM base die also reduces the footprint of memory-related circuitry on the main custom accelerator die. Traditionally, the HBM memory controller has been incorporated into the primary silicon die on the package. NVHBM instead moves the memory controller into the base die of the HBM stack and provides a smaller custom PHY that NVLink Fusion customers can then integrate into their designs.

Nvidia says this approach frees up precious package real estate that can then be used for additional compute die area — up to 30% more compute on the primary silicon die. NVHBM further promises to simplify the interposer routing used to join multiple chips together for designs using advanced packaging techniques.

NVHBM also provides power savings versus off-the-shelf HBM4e stacks. As Nvidia has continuously hammered home in the Vera Rubin roll-out, every watt that isn't going into token production is a watt wasted. Nvidia says NVHBM uses 15% less power than commodity HBM4e, and that power savings can be banked for performance-per-watt improvements, reallocated into more functional units for a custom accelerator design, or translated into higher sustained performance within the same power budget.

Higher bandwidth at lower power is a huge win for AI accelerators that are moving massive data structures like model weights and KV caches around, especially when those savings are multiplied across many thousands of chips. The energy saved on data movement can be plowed back into higher performance from the accelerator itself or reallocated to support larger numbers of accelerators within the same fixed power envelope.

But these are, as of now, reasons for Nvidia's prospective partners to consider incorporating NVLink Fusion and NVHBM into their custom designs, not benefits that will materialize in the Rubin rack-scale systems already in production.

Along with NVHBM itself, Nvidia announced that Amazon's Annapurna Labs will be its first partner on NVHBM. , and Annapurna VP Nafea Bshara says: “We look forward to this technology collaboration to benefit future AWS infrastructure designs.” Annapurna's next-generation Trainium 4 AI chips will already support the NVLink Fusion scale-up interface, so it seems likely that follow-on chips will support NVHBM, too.

Earlier this month, Samsung introduced the industry's first LPDDR5X-PIM memory, adding in-memory logic to the low-power memory standard, and at Hot Chips 2026, it dove into the memory technology that we've previously seen at play through HBM stacks.

PIM, or Processing-in-Memory, is a technology Samsung demoed as early as 2021, piloted through HBM stacks in AMD accelerators. It's a small bit of logic that sits alongside DRAM cells, allowing basic calculations to happen directly in-memory. By handling those basic calculations locally, Samsung is able to eliminate the processor as a bottleneck and speed up, in particular, AI inference. In inference tasks, Samsung says its LPDDR5X-PIM is 2.28x faster than standard LPDDR5X, in fact.

The reason for adding in-memory processing to LPDDR5X is pretty clear: HBM is too damn expensive. Micron warned just a day earning at Hot Chips that the HBM wafer demand is only getting worse, and Samsung opened its presentation with something we're all well aware of. Memory makes up the bulk of AI chip costs, and its share of the pie continues to grow. Add on top of that the power demands of DDR5, much less HBM, and LPDDR5X seems like an ideal target for PIM.

Samsung introduced HBM-PIM in 2023, and at the time, introduced the concept of LPDDR5X-PIM. What it shared at Hot Chips is a real product, taking the concept of LPDDR5X-PIM and putting it through validation. Samsung is also looking ahead for LPDDR6X-PIM, and the company says it hopes to have an initial specification from JEDEC this year.

Bringing in-memory processing to Samsung LPDDR5X

Above, you can see a basic layout of how Samsung integrated PIM into LPDDR5X. Each memory bank has its own PIM, which is an advancement over HBM-PIM, where Samsung had to cut banks to fit the logic. The memory bank, scale register file, and source register file feed parallel MAC trees. Once calculated, the output (either integer or floating point output) is written to a vector register file.

Samsung says its LPDDR5X can operate in two modes: single-bank (traditional DRAM) or multi-bank (PIM). Traditional DRAM controllers work, with commands switching between standard read/write or a PIM read/write depending on the mode. The challenge, according to Samsung, was reordering with conventional DRAM.

Samsung uses what it calls Address Align Mode (AAM) to get around the reordering issue. It maps DRAM addresses to MAC instructions, assigning the VRF/SRF address based on the RA/CA address, respectively, and not the Instruction Register File.

To demonstrate how data moves through the memory cells and calculations are performed, Samsung provided an example of a MAC operation, assuming weight parameters for the data are already written into the cell, and the memory is operating in multi-bank (PIM) mode.

Storing 512 bytes of FP8 activation data, it's first broken down into 16, 256-bit packets, which are written into each of the banks in and noted in the Source Register File.

A PIMX_RD reads the weight data from the DRAM bank, feeding into the MAC trees alongside the data from the SRF. Once the calculation is done, the output vector from each operation is written into the Vector Register File.

Once the calculation is done, a PIMX_WR command transfers the output data back to the DRAM bank. Samsung noted there doesn't need to be a 1:1 relationship between reads and writes, but it's useful for this example. With a VRF size of 1 kbit, a maximum of four calculations can be written to the VRF.

With the output written back to memory banks, the host just needs to read the data from memory. The host switches to single-bank (conventional DRAM) mode and executes 16 reads to gather the output from all of the memory banks.

Samsung LPDDR5X specs and preliminary performance

Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM looks a lot like LPDDR5X. It uses a standard 561-ball array for packaging, just like LPDDR5X, and Samsung uses two 64-bit ranks with 16 GB modules. The critical number here is bandwidth. With LPDDR5X-9600, peak bandwidth is 76.8 GB/s, but that's increased by eightfold with PIM to 614 GB/s by reducing data movement and keeping basic logic local.

Samsung uses four dies per rank, for a total of eight dies. Not the various registers above, as well, as they're important for the illustration of data flow through Samsung's LPDDR5X-PIM memory.

In Samsung's preliminary benchmarks, LPDDR5X-PIM is impressive. In model run time, Samsung say a 2.28x improvement with PIM, and in tokens per second (TPS), PIM offered a 3.01x increase in performance.

The slide above shows what happened behind the scenes to gather these numbers, with Samsung using an edge AI accelerator — we're not sure which, but perhaps an early Gaia SoC — and testing Llama 3.1 with 8 billion parameters. Notably, the output is different, which one attendee pressed Samsung about. The company says optimizations are ongoing to improve accuracy, but it expects the performance benefit to remain the same.

One of the main advantages of LPDDR5X is right there in the name: low power. With PIM, power consumption becomes more of a concern, but Samsung says it doesn't expect higher power consumption overall compared to conventional DRAM. The presenter noted that peak power consumption will be "much higher" due to the bursty power draw of the PIM, but Samsung still expects overall power draw to be lower than conventional DRAM.

That comes down to extra reads/writes. Although PIM represents a power increase, decreasing the number of times data needs to move between DRAM and the host will lead to overall lower power consumption. "We're not having significant power increase," as Samsung's Karam Hwang put it.

LPDDR5X has, until recently, only had applications in consumer products. However, SOCAMM2 serviceable modules allowed Nvidia to use LPDDR5X as the memory of choice with its Vera CPU. And Intel uses LPDDR5X with its new Crescent Island AI accelerator.

Even with PIM, LPDDR5X doesn't come remotely close to the bandwidth with available with HBM, but it has a lot of applications elsewhere. Samsung's targets of server, client, and mobile are telling, with LPDDR5X-PIM accelerating edge AI on mobile and client devices, as well as arriving in lower-scope accelerators like Crescent Island.

Full Samsung Hot Chips 2026 presentation

Looking back in time is always interesting, especially when visiting any topic that's technology-adjacent — and doubly so when looking at the evolution of pricing. The price of memory continues to be a hot-button topic, and an eagle-eyed Redditor came across a 1995 press release from Advantage Memory Corporation announcing prices for its freshly released DIMMs, revealing that fitting a high-end machine with 1 GB of RAM would set you back as much as a cheap house.

The figures on display are rather shocking when converted to today's dollars, with 8 MB of RAM going for $399, or $874 in today's money, and a 64 MB stick ringing in at $3,900, or $8,540 in 2026. The Apple Power Macintosh mentioned in the PR had 12 slots, so it could fit in as much as 1.5 GB of RAM, and although the pricing for 128 MB DIMMs wasn't mentioned, those would be around $8,000 a pop, so "only" 1 GB of RAM would come in at $64,000 — enough for a house back then in the more affordable areas of the U.S. By the way, that amount would be $140,000 today.

In 1995, memory technology was transitioning from SIMMs to the spankin' new DIMMs, and Command and Conquer, MechWarrior 2, and the original Need for Speed were coming out. 16 MB of RAM was generally accepted as a decent amount of memory for a build, roughly matching the 16 GB of today. Some quick math says those 16 MB of the new technology were about $800, or in today's money, the princely sum of $1,751.

As of today, 16 GB of DDR5 will set you back $200 to $250, but the price of memory has been extremely volatile, to say the least. Plus, not only is supply rumored to drop, server RAM contract prices are expected to rise, and the few crumbs left for the consumer market are still rising in price.

SK hynix chairman Chey Tae-won even suggested that DRAM wafer shortages could last until 2030 at least. The fact that all the major RAM makers are shifting their production lines to HBM for AI accelerators is only making the problem worse. Yes, $200 is still a long way from $1,750, but with things keeping in this direction, there's a non-zero chance this very article will be linked to in the near future.

At any rate, despite the poor outlook, these figures reveal just how much technology really became democratized with time. Any form of PC was really expensive back in 1995. Around that era, Bill Gates said that there would be "a PC at every home, and at every desk." That statement sounded a little insane back then, but in retrospect wasn't crazy enough, as today we have what would be sci-fi hardware... in everyone's pocket or purse.

When it comes to building a gaming PC, DDR5 RAM clocked at speeds of 6,000 MT/s is often touted as the sweet spot for specs. While slower and faster speeds are available, it's very much the benchmark for both price and performance, which is why it's noteworthy that this particular configuration now costs $400, a more than 400% increase from the low prices we've seen in the past.

• $401 for Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5 600 ($215 off)

In addition to our ongoing RAM price tracking, we perform daily spot checks on pricing for discounts or deals for 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR5 RAM, given its aforementioned significance as the "benchmark" when it comes to capacity. In recent weeks, the price of 32GB DDR5 6000 RAM has been creeping ever closer to that unfortunate $400 milestone, and in the last few hours we've just crossed the threshold. That's not to say that prices might fluctuate back down in a day or two, but generally the traffic is only moving in one direction.

You can buy 32GB of DDR5 RAM at slower speeds for less — this Corsair Vengeance DDR5 4800 is "just" $359 — but good RAM is now harder (and more expensive) to come by than ever before.

According to data from PCPartPicker, this particular 32GB DDR5 6000 kit from Corsair has been as little as $80 in years gone by at Newegg, marking a full 400% price increase on the lowest we've ever seen on this model.

RAM prices elsewhere have climbed by as much as 500%, with 128GB of DDR5 now costing $3,399 in stores. The causes of the PC component crisis are numerous and well-documented. AI buildouts are consuming much of the world's NAND and flash manufacturing capacity, which is having a knock-on effect for consumer production. Famously, Micron even wound up its consumer brand Crucial in favor of serving more enterprise customers.

All signs point to the memory shortage, and thereby pricing, getting worse in the coming months. As such, bundles and pre-built PCs remain one of the only ways to insulate yourself from cost increases if you're in the market for new hardware. As mentioned, slower memory speeds are available at lower prices, but compromising for 4,800 MT/s RAM to save $40 when building a PC is an extremely tough state of affairs.

Memory will account for roughly 30% of hyperscaler capex this year, up from about 8% in 2023 and 2024. Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% in a single quarter, and Meta is already running recycled DDR4 behind CXL across millions of servers, cutting server counts by up to 25% for some inference workloads. Into that market, Marvell has brought a three-tier "AI memory infrastructure" portfolio, announced at FMS 2026 in Santa Clara on August 4 and pitched to EE Times last week, where product marketing VP Khurram Malik put DDR4 reuse at the top of the CXL use-case list.

Only one piece of it is new: the Bravera SC6 PCIe 6.0 SSD controller, which samples in Q4. Structera X has been shipping since 2024, the Structera S switch was announced at OFC in March, and the Photonic Fabric optical memory tier came with the Celestial AI acquisition in February. Meta, the reference customer for the use case Marvell is selling, did it with an ASIC of its own design rather than anything from Marvell.

What's new (and what isn't)

The Bravera SC6 is a PCIe 6.0 x4 controller with 16 NAND channels, eight chip enables per channel, a 3,600 MT/s ONFI and Toggle interface, and 12 Arm Cortex-R82 cores plus three Cortex-M7s, according to Marvell's product blog.

Marvell says it doubles the Bravera SC5, supports NAND from multiple suppliers, and uses a host-managed flash translation layer, meaning cloud operators control write placement, garbage collection, and wear leveling themselves, with KV cache spillover from HBM to SSD as the primary workload. Sampling starts in Q4 2026, which puts drives in 2027 at the earliest on the timeline Tom's Hardware Premium laid out for the PCIe 6.0 controller field, where Phison and Silicon Motion are chasing the same Gen6 drive launches.

Structera X 2404 and X 2504, the DDR4 and DDR5 expansion controllers, were announced in July 2024, and Marvell's FMS blog says both are in hyperscaler deployments, with inline LZ4 compression that Malik told EE Times yields roughly 2 to 2.5 times the effective capacity.

The Structera S 30260 switch, announced at OFC in March, carries 260 PCIe 6.0 and CXL 3.x lanes, connects 16 or 32 CPUs or GPUs to up to 48TB of shared memory at 4 TB/s aggregate bandwidth and under 460ns round trip, and begins sampling this quarter. Photonic Fabric came in with the $3.25 billion Celestial AI acquisition that closed in February, with Marvell now describing it as a shared-memory tier reaching up to 50 meters with up to 32 TB of warm KV cache and a claimed 2 to 3 times token throughput inside existing footprints. Marvell also took a $2 billion investment from Nvidia in March, tied to NVLink Fusion, the proprietary scale-up fabric CXL pooling has to sit alongside.

DRAM contract prices have tripled since Structera launched

Conventional DRAM contract prices rose 90% to 95% quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2026, the steepest increase on record for every DRAM category. Q2 added another 58% to 63%, and server DRAM is set to climb a further 13% to 18% in Q3, held in check mainly by the long-term agreements U.S. hyperscalers signed to cap pricing through 2027 and 2028. Server DRAM buyers in the U.S. and China were receiving about 70% of their orders late last year as suppliers diverted wafers to HBM.

Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron have all been winding down DDR4 output since last year, and TrendForce put the legacy memory rally at up to 50% for DDR4 in Q1 alone. A module pulled from a decommissioned 2021 server is now worth a multiple of what it was when Structera X was announced, and the DDR5 that would replace it has roughly doubled in price twice. When Marvell first pitched DDR4 reuse in 2024, it was a sustainability line item, but two years later, the memory crunch has turned it into a capex line item.

Meta's recycling numbers

Meta's Vistara ASIC, presented at ISCA 2026 in late June, is a CXL 2.0 Type-3 expander on a PCIe 5.0 x16 link that bridges two DDR4 channels to a host and runs at 128GB per chip using 32GB modules recovered from retired machines. Each MemServer pairs a 158-core AMD EPYC Turin with 768GB of local DDR5-6400 and 256GB of CXL-attached DDR4-2400, and Meta claims idle round-trip latency of around 50ns on the controller path.

The paper states that around 40% of Meta's fleet is memory-capacity bound, that its servers last three to five years while the DRAM inside them is good for seven to 10, and that the deployment cuts server counts by up to 25% for disaggregated ML inference, average latency by 29% for distributed caching, and job failures by 33%, The Register from the paper ahead of the talk.

Malik told EE Times, "The first and foremost important use case within CXL is the recycling of DDR4," and Marvell's FMS release says Structera X was "developed in close collaboration with leading hyperscalers" without naming one. Meta's paper describes an in-house ASIC, an in-house MemServer chassis, and an in-house Linux page-placement stack, the full path one would take when volume justifies its own silicon, while Astera Labs' Leo controllers reached Microsoft Azure's M-series preview in November last year.

CXL's deployment gap

SemiAnalysis declared CXL dead for AI in March 2024 because Ethernet-style SerDes such as NVLink carry roughly three times the bandwidth per millimeter of die edge as PCIe 5.0 or 6.0, so every CXL lane on an accelerator costs scale-up bandwidth that could have gone to the GPU-to-GPU fabric instead.

Marvell's CXL pitch accordingly targets CPU-side capacity and KV cache staging rather than the GPU-to-GPU path where you’ll find NVLink Fusion. Yole estimated two-thirds of servers sold in Q1 2025 were CXL-capable and expects more than 90% to be by the end of this year, yet it puts the share of servers actually using CXL at close to zero today and only 13% by 2030.

Marvell's benchmarks for the Structera S show a 16TB pooled DRAM tier delivering 4.8 times the inference throughput and an 82.7% cut in time to first token in GPU configurations, attributed to keeping KV cache in DRAM instead of recomputing or reloading it. Those are vendor numbers with no disclosed model or baseline, and the switch only starts sampling this quarter. Nvidia, AMD, and the SSD makers all offer their own routes for the same cache spillover.

Nvidia has told some of its largest customers that the prices of servers containing its AI chips will rise by more than 15% in many cases, Bloomberg reported on Saturday. The increases will take effect on Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year, according to people familiar with the matter, who commented on communications that have not yet been made public. The size of each increase will depend on the chip generation and the memory configuration involved. Companies that build servers under contract for large data center operators, including Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, have recently notified their customers of the forthcoming increases, the people told Bloomberg.

This is another example of the so-called "RAMageddon" that's gripping the DRAM market, with contract prices having risen at record rates this year. Analysts projected that conventional DRAM contract prices would climb 58% to 63% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2026, following a Q1 surge of 90% to 95%, as suppliers reallocated capacity toward HBM and server products. SK hynix said in October last year that it had already sold out its entire 2026 memory production capacity, and Samsung and SK hynix raised 2026 HBM3E supply prices by close to 20% before the year began.

AI systems carry enormous memory loadouts, with Nvidia's Rubin GPU shipping with up to 288GB of HBM4 per package, and the NVL72 rack-scale system combines 72 of those GPUs, putting more than 20TB of HBM in a single rack before accounting for the LPDDR attached to its Vera CPUs. With HBM production consuming roughly four times the wafer area of equivalent conventional DRAM, memory has become one of the largest line items in an AI server's bill of materials, and it's continuing to rise at a stratospheric pace.

Ironically, the supply crunch that's now inflating Nvidia's systems is the same one its demand helped to create. The three major memory makers spent this and last year shifting advanced nodes and new capacity toward HBM and high-capacity server DRAM, starving commodity markets in the process. Consumer DDR5 pricing has more than doubled since late 2025 as a result, with a mainstream 32GB DDR5-6000 kit selling for around $392 in August against $110 to $140 a year earlier, according to our RAM price tracker.

Nvidia has already passed rising costs through to consumers, raising prices on GeForce graphics cards earlier this month. The Bloomberg report indicates the same unrelenting pressure has now reached the top of the Nvidia stack, where hyperscalers as well as PC builders will be absorbing the increase. A 15% rise on rack-scale systems that sell for several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands of dollars per rack across deployments that run to thousands of racks.

Nvidia runs a gross margin of roughly 75% non-GAAP, among the highest in the semiconductor industry, and the reported hikes indicate the company intends to pass memory cost inflation on to customers rather than absorb it, which it can more than afford to do. Meanwhile, supply of its accelerators from TSMC still can't meet demand, which limits buyers' immediate leverage.

Whether the increases push hyperscalers further toward AMD's accelerators or their own custom silicon will depend on how quickly those alternatives can absorb displaced demand, and all of them draw HBM from the same three constrained suppliers.

Bad bots account for 91% of the traffic reaching one retailer's DDR5 memory product pages, roughly 10 automated requests for every legitimate visit, according to a LinkedIn post this week from Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at bot-mitigation firm DataDome. The figure updates research DataDome published in March, which measured the ratio at about 6:1 across several e-commerce sites.

Over the same period, the cheapest 128GB DDR5-6400 kit tracked by Tom's Hardware has reached $3,399, ten times its record low pricing. The Thales 2026 Bad Bot Report puts bad bots at 40% of all web traffic, less than half the share Segura reports on DDR5 listings.

DataDome's March report documented a single operation that generated more than 10 million blocked requests, with a one-hour sample showing 91 DDR5 listings each polled around 551 times, or once every 6.5 seconds. The requests carried cache-busting parameters to defeat cached stock data and targeted industrial module makers such as Micron and Apacer, as well as DIMM socket suppliers Amphenol and TE Connectivity, alongside consumer brands.

Segura wrote on LinkedIn that retailers carrying memory should assume their "traffic analytics are probably understating the problem significantly."

Keep in mind that the 91% figure comes from one unnamed retailer, and DataDome hasn't published a sample window or its methodology. DataDome also sells the product that blocks this traffic, and page requests ultimately aren't purchases, so the ratio measures monitoring pressure on listings rather than how much stock bots actually end up securing, which can’t easily be quantified.

Apacer CEO C.K. Chang said in July that DRAM supply to independent module makers could fall to 30% of 2026 levels next year, and TrendForce expects conventional DRAM contract prices to rise another 13% to 18% in Q3 after roughly 60% in Q2. Hyperscale buyers have reportedly placed deposits against most of 2027's DRAM output.

A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit that averaged $72 this time last year now averages $392 on PCPartPicker. While graphics card and console scalping in 2020 and 2021 ran against scheduled restocks that eventually outpaced resale demand, no equivalent restock date exists for consumer DDR5 before 2027 at the earliest.

Framework stopped selling standalone RAM in November last year, citing scalpers, and Micro Center sells its CPU, motherboard, and 32GB DDR5 bundles in-store only with a one-per-household limit. Newegg and Amazon have run repeated CPU-plus-memory bundles that price a 32GB kit well below its standalone cost, which ties each kit to a processor a reseller then has to move as well. On eBay, we found G.Skill's Trident Z5 Neo 32GB kit listed at $836.54 in December against a $429.99 retail price, roughly double, and about seven times the $117.99 it sold for before the shortage.

ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), planned to obtain Samsung's IP related to its memory process technologies in a bid to develop its own production nodes, according to testimony given in a South Korean criminal case involving leaked Samsung technology, reports Maeil Business. The company's managers allegedly had no intention to develop an in-house process technology from scratch, so obtaining IP from Samsung was a strategic decision.

The intention was a key part of CXMT's business plan rather than an opportunistic attempt to acquire Samsung's technology after the start of its own DRAM process development, according to the testimony of a former Samsung engineer identified as Jeon, who worked at Samsung for 28 years before jumping ship to CXMT sometimes around 2016. This April, Jeon was sentenced to seven years in prison for illegally obtaining a 600-step Process Recipe Plan (PRP) information concerning Samsung's DRAM fabrication processes in general and the 18nm-class node in particular.

"From the beginning, CXMT CEO and CTO tried to develop DRAM by stealing Samsung Electronics' Process Recipe Plan (PRP) information," Jeon told the court this week, according to Maeil Business. "CXMT had no research institutes or facilities at the time of its establishment, and had no intention of developing technology through its own research."

Copying the recipe does not automatically give you a working process. Nonetheless, a detailed process recipe can dramatically shorten development of any production node because it reveals things like the sequence of steps, deposition or etch conditions, anneals, cleans, implant parameters, temperatures, pressures, tool types, and so on. For a memory process, a ready process recipe can remove a huge amount of trial-and-error and reveal how the process integration is supposed to work. Meanwhile, even to ensure that the recipe works as intended, one needs to obtain the same or compatible tools as well as adjust their characteristics accordingly.

However, while a process recipe can potentially help to ramp any fabrication technology, a process recipe itself does not necessarily reveal the complete transistor architecture or physical design. For that, perpetrators also want things like cross-sectional structures, masks/layout information, design rules, device dimensions, capacitor geometry, process window, and so on. Such details are not easy to get for a brand-new fabrication technology, but they can be obtained by reverse engineering of shipping products. By combining process recipe with reverse engineering, experienced DRAM engineers can reconstruct much of the technology. Meanwhile, process integration engineers can save years of trial-and-error with actual fab tools.

Normally, it takes DRAM companies around 3 – 5 years to design a process node from device development to yield ramp. For a new player, development time from scratch will probably be around five years rather than three unless pre-competitive IP is licensed or certain heavy-lifting is done elsewhere. In fact, the Maeil Business report claims it took Samsung five years to develop its 18nm-class node.

Meanwhile, CXMT began mass production of DDR4 SDRAM in 2019 using a 22nm-class node. Mass production of memory using a 18nm-class process technology began in 2023. Such a timeline raises a question of whether CXMT's 22nm-class G1 was derived/adapted from the knowledge of Samsung's process technologies and/or their process recipes, the more advanced 18nm-class node, or did the allegedly obtained Samsung IP primarily help CXMT develop the later 18nm generation? In any case, there is a court ruling that CXMT stole IP from Samsung to boost its own memory production capability.

After posting record profits amid high memory prices, SK hynix ran into a dispute with employees over profit sharing and wage increases, which threatened to escalate into collective action by the company's union. This week, SK hynix management and the labor union reached a preliminary 2026 wage and collective bargaining agreement that significantly changes how the company's profit-sharing bonuses will be distributed, reports Maeil Business citing Yonhap. The good news is that no strikes are planned at the memory maker.

The tentative labor package reportedly calls for a 6.3% wage increase and an increase in welfare points provided by the company. In addition, under the proposed arrangement, employees will receive 40% of their performance-based profit distribution in cash, while the remaining 60% will come in the form of SK hynix shares. The proposal changes SK hynix's 2025 profit-sharing scheme, which allocated 10% of the previous year's operating profit to employee profit-sharing program, but the bonus was to be paid complete in cash: employees received 80% in cash immediately and remaining 20% over the next two years.

The union argued that stock-based bonuses expose employees to potential losses if SK hynix shares decline and could create tax complications, as income tax may be calculated using the share price when the stock is awarded. Specifically, the workers argued that performance bonuses normally paid in cash should not be converted into assets that carry investment risk. Yet, the SK hynix management and union have agreed to remove the 10% ceiling, potentially providing more money to employees, maintain the mechanism for 10 years, and pay the bonuses in cash and stock.

If SK hynix meets current market expectations and earns 25 trillion won ($17.897 billion) in operating profit this year, the profit-sharing pool would amount to 2.5 trillion won ($1.79 billion) based on the 10% formula. SK hynix reportedly has approximately 35,000 employees, so on average every employee will get 70 million won, or $50,120 ($20,048 in cash and $30,072 in stock). Yet, actual compensation will differ depending on an employee's position and individual performance assessment.

On August 4, before the fifth round of negotiations, an SK hynix union told members that if management did not present a revised proposal, it would be difficult to settle the dispute through negotiations alone and the union would have to take necessary action, which was obviously a way to threaten the management with a strike. Yet, the parties have come to terms.

The dispute comes as Samsung Electronics has faced similar labor action over compensations.

G.Skill, maker of some of the best RAM for PC gaming, has begun sending payments to claimants in the $2.4 million class action lawsuit over claims that it falsely advertised the speeds of its memory, misleading customers because the very fastest speeds could only be obtained by overclocking. According to screenshots from different users, reimbursements range from a paltry $20 to $25.

According to the lawsuit filed in 2022, G.Skill reportedly did not make it clear to consumers that overclocking was necessary to reach the advertised memory speeds on its DDR4 and DDR5 offerings from the Trident Z and Ripjaw series. The plaintiffs claimed that G.Skill’s packaging did not warn consumers about the potential risks associated with overclocking, such as system instability, or even possible hardware damage.

While G.Skill denied the allegations and asserted that its products were properly labeled, the company eventually reached a $2.4 million settlement with the plaintiffs. As part of the settlement, G.Skill would send cash payouts to eligible U.S. consumers who purchased certain DDR4 or DDR5 memory kits during the period mentioned in the lawsuit.

The exact payout amount for each claimant depends on the total number of claims submitted and how many qualifying G.Skill memory kits each person purchased. For example, one X user shared that they received $19.68, while separate reports on Facebook indicated that two users received $24.60 each.

In addition to the cash payout, G.Skill agreed to update the packaging for its memory kits and online product listings with clear disclaimers that consumers must overclock the memory kit, whether through Intel XMP or AMD EXPO enablement, to reach the rated memory speeds.

Memory speeds are a complex topic for the average computer user. Not everyone understands that memory kits default to the JEDEC baseline, whether DDR4-2133 or DDR5-4800, for maximum compatibility. However, to reach advertised speeds above the baseline, you need to overclock. Multiple hardware variables affect whether you can successfully use a memory kit that exceeds the manufacturer's specification.

For starters, the processor’s integrated memory controller (IMC) determines whether it can run memory above the manufacturer's specification, for example, DDR5-5600 for AMD Ryzen 9000 or DDR5-6400 for Intel Core Ultra 200S processors. That is the memory speed that the chipmaker guarantees will work on the chip. Furthermore, the motherboard must support the desired memory speeds. The QVL is a good place to start since it includes memory kits that the vendor has tested and confirmed to work on the motherboard. However, the QVL is not foolproof because the motherboard is only one of two factors at play, and sometimes the processor's IMC plays a bigger role.

Less experienced consumers may blame a memory kit for not working in a system. However, they fail to consider that the processor and motherboard are equally important. Memory speeds above the processor's default specification are not always plug-and-play, and it is good that manufacturers communicate this clearly to avoid consumer confusion and disappointment if a memory kit does not perform as advertised.

Pine64 has stopped producing Linux devices entirely, announcing this week on its official Telegram news channel that "there isn't [sic] any plans to continue producing more Linux devices in the near future" because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. The stoppage covers the company's full lineup of Arm and RISC-V single-board computers, the PinePhone family, the PineTab2 tablet, and the PineNote e-reader, with remaining PineNote and PineTab2 stock estimated to last around three months.

Microcontroller-based products, such as the PineTime smartwatch, PineVoice smart speaker, and Pinecil soldering iron, won't be affected, and production will continue as usual. Development on the upcoming PineTime Pro will also continue: Pine64 said its demo firmware now has basic drivers for the display, touch, motion sensing, GPS, and audio, though some issues need fixing before a pilot batch enters production. The company also hasn't ended software support for existing Linux hardware.

The AI-driven memory crunch has raised prices on everything from DDR5 kits — which have sold on eBay for more than $2,000 — to prebuilt PCs from Dell, CyberPowerPC, and Maingear. Unfortunately, Pine64 buys the single worst-supplied part in the entire NAND market. TrendForce reported in April that the eMMC/UFS segment faces the tightest supply gap of any NAND category, because its production capacity overlaps with far higher-margin enterprise SSDs, making it the last in line for supplier allocation.

Phison CEO Khein-Seng Pua said in February that 8GB eMMC modules had risen from $1.50 to $20 in a year, a 13-fold increase, and warned the shortage could shut down entire consumer electronics companies in 2026. Pine64 hasn't shut down, but a whole product category has, and it's the first named vendor to kill a lineup outright instead of repricing it.

Other small-board makers have taken the opposite route. Raspberry Pi has raised prices repeatedly, pushing the Pi 5 16GB to $205 and the 500+ to $410, while launching a 3GB Pi 4 and leaning on a stockpile of older LPDDR2 to hold prices on legacy boards. Framework followed in January, raising its desktop pricing to cover LPDDR5x costs, which, since Strix Halo boards use soldered RAM, it couldn't pass to users any other way.

Pine64 sells its hardware near cost as a community service, so it has no margin to absorb higher component prices and, evidently, believes its buyers won't, either. Its mid-2027 checkpoint aligns with supply forecasts that don't expect new memory fab capacity to arrive in volume before late 2027 or 2028.

Pine64 said any decision on resuming production depends on component pricing after mid-2027, meaning its Linux hardware could be off the market for two years — or more.

The XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is Adata's latest memory kit to hit the market, going toe-to-toe with the best RAM. Although we are still living in a memory shortage, memory brands will continue to release new memory products. The releases are not as frequent as before, but we are glad that companies still support consumers. As always, more competition helps improve prices and offers more options for consumers to choose from. Adata recently brought a new Novakey series to the market. It is a product from the brand's XPG division, with a strong emphasis on gaming culture. However, unlike some of Adata's other series that are available with and without RGB lighting, the Novakey lineup is only available with the former.

Adata’s Novakey memory modules stand out for the company's commitment to sustainability. It produces the memory modules with recycled materials, specifically 50% aluminum and 85% post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic. The heat spreader, which features a brushed matte black aluminum construction, looks nice. The memory modules measure 1.79 inches (45.5 mm) in height, which we do not expect to pose a problem for big air CPU coolers, but it never hurts to double-check.

A defining feature of the Novakey memory modules is the debut of Adata’s patented “Infinity Mirror” design. When not powered on, the surface is synonymous with a reflective mirror. Once illuminated, though, it transforms into a dazzling visual effect. With the help of the lighting, the futuristic geometric silhouette gives the impression that the image looks 3D-ish and pops out.

The Infinity Mirror effect is present on only one side of the memory module, though. The opposite side features a standard black decorative strip. For customization, Adata offers its XPG Prime software, or you can use your motherboard's software, whether it be Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light Sync, or ASRock Polychrome Sync.

Under the sleek heat spreader, you will find a black 10-layer PCB with eight integrated circuits (ICs) on one side. It uses 2GB SK hynix H5CG48MEBDX014 (M-die) ICs to reach 16GB on each memory module. Meanwhile, Adata sources the power management integrated circuit (PMIC) from Richtek, labeled 0P=CH QYK.

For maximum compatibility, the Novakey memory modules run at DDR5-4800 with memory timings at 40-39-39-77. It supports both Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO technologies. Regardless of the standard, the only profile onboard the memory modules will get them up to DDR5-6000 and configure the memory timings and DRAM voltage to 30-40-40-77 and 1.4V, respectively. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system features the Core Ultra 9 285K processor and the MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X motherboard with firmware version 7E20v1AA0. Conversely, the AMD system utilizes the Ryzen 9 9900X processor and the MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi motherboard with firmware version 7E49v1AA3. The Corsair iCUE Link Titan 360 RX LCD CPU liquid-cooling solution efficiently maintains optimal temperatures for both the Arrow Lake and Zen 5 processors, ensuring efficient thermal management across platforms.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio efficiently handles demanding graphics workloads, preventing any bottlenecks during our gaming RAM benchmarks. The TeamGroup A440 Lite PCIe 4.0 SSD balances performance and capacity, delivering 2TB of ultra-fast storage with speeds up to 7,400 MB/s—perfect for Windows 11 24H2 installations, benchmarking software, and gaming applications.

The Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply delivers reliable and ample power to our test systems, directly supporting the GeForce RTX 4080 via its native 16-pin (12VHPWR) cable. The Streacom BC1 open-air test bench offers flexible, tool-free accommodation for all hardware components, streamlining assembly and component swaps.

Intel Performance

On average, the Novakey memory kit performed a bit slower than competing options like the Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 C36 and the Ripjaws S5 DDR5-6000 C32. The performance gap is not massive, though. Although the Novakey boasts an impressive CAS Latency (CL) of 30 clock cycles, its other memory timings are comparatively loose, which affects bandwidth and latency, leading to lower real-world performance.-world performance.

AMD Performance

Adata’s memory kit delivered similar performance on the AMD system. It neither stood out as the fastest nor lagged behind the slower memory kit among the tested options. The performance was consistent across the range of different benchmarks.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

Overclocking on the Novakey was a breeze. The only downside is that the kit already operates at a relatively high 1.4V for DDR5-6000, so we needed to increase the voltage further to 1.45V to gain any headroom for overclocking. The memory kit proved to be quite capable and handled DDR5-6400 speeds with the same timings.

The memory kit was unforgiving when attempting to tighten the CL timing, even with additional voltage applied. On the contrary, both the tRCD and tRP timings showed a bit more flexibility under 1.45V and allowed us to decrease them to 36 cycles, four cycles lower than the default values.

Bottom Line

The XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is not just about looking good inside your system, thanks to the vibrant and customizable Infinity Mirror design. The memory kit's performance will not let you down, even if it's not the fastest contender on the market. At DDR5-6000, Adata is intentionally targeting the sweet spot for both Intel and AMD platforms. The fact that the XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 C30 arrives with both Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO overclocking profile support ensures seamless integration regardless of the platform of choice.

The XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 C30 has yet to make its debut on the hardware shelves at U.S. retailers. However, Adata has put the memory kit up for pre-order through Adata’s official online store for $589.99. While the price is certainly steep, it falls within expectations of a premium memory kit that is coming out during the memory shortage. Once things get back to normal, we should see Adata's memory kit at a more reasonable price. But for the meantime, the XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 C30 represents a luxury that not many consumers can buy.

There was a time when PC RAM and storage products were sold with lifetime warranties. Replacement of these components was an inconvenience at worst, with parts exhibiting great reliability and sold at trifling prices. In 2026, the tide has fully turned, and we see even the largest businesses wriggling to avoid warranty repairs and replacements with little shame. Yet another anti-consumer case in point is shared by GRINZ_DOCTOR on the Mildly Infuriating Subreddit. It appears to be a bizarre episode where Best Buy ‘repaired’ an under-warranty laptop by simply removing one of its SODIMMs, testing it worked reliably, and then sent it back to the customer with half the memory it originally shipped with installed, confusion possibly caused by a purchase made from a third-party seller.

You can see at the top of the letter from Best Buy/Geek Squad, dated August this year, the device sent in for warranty repair was a “Lenovo – Upgraded – Legion 5 15.1-inch WXGA Gaming Laptop, Intel i9-14900HX, RTX 5070, 64GB DDR5, 2TB SSD, +1TB dock station, Win 11 Pro” laptop in black, available to buy at Best Buy in the exact configuration. One possible reason for the mishap is that the linked product here is sold by a third-party retailer, PC Heaven, which offers "professionally customized and upgraded configurations." Upgraded in the product listing may be a giveaway that this is, in fact, one of PC Heaven's souped-up options.

GRINZ_DOCTOR sent the eight-month-old 64 GB laptop in for attention after beginning to experience repeated blue screen crashes. The notes mention that underlying software issues were basically ruled out ahead of the warranty return, as reinstalling Windows didn’t help.

Amputation was the chosen 'cure'

The technician accepted the Legion 5 in good cosmetic condition with “no visible wear or damage.” After investigations, the blue screen issues were clearly pinned on RAM, as the Best Buy tech closed the case with repair notes as follows: “Unit has two 32GB sticks for a total of 64GB; this unit only accepts 32GB RAM maximum. One stick of 32GB has been removed and sent back to client with unit.” Before ending the note with the punchline “Unit passed all tests.”

Of course, we don’t know exactly what was done by the repair tech during their fault-finding and resolution process. While GRINZ_DOCTOR insists they bought the unit as described on the upper section of the document with 64GB pre-installed, a product you can still get on Best Buy right now, it seems the most likely explanation for the snafu is that the customer bought an upgraded model from a third-party reseller. Best Buy's insistence that the laptop only supports 32GB of RAM does clash with the user's report that the laptop worked for eight months. Moreover, this certainly doesn't change the fact that they simply took the RAM from the machine without the customer's input. Best Buy also continues to list a configuration of a laptop on its website that the company admits is unsupported by the hardware.

Plenty of commenters have advised escalating the issue with Best Buy. They are advised to go to the store in person and keep escalating until a proper remedy - meaning a new working second RAM stick, or a like-for-like laptop replacement - is done. However, if they did indeed buy a third-party offering, their options may be limited.

Earlier this month, we reported on Micron offering pennies on the dollar for Crucial RAM returns. Meanwhile, in NAND-land, SK hynix reportedly ran out of replacement SSDs and is instead insisting on original purchase price refunds.

We're officially in dire straits. There's almost no way, if you're reading this site, that you aren't aware that memory prices have become entirely divorced from reality. Some are calling it the RAMpocalypse; I prefer "RAMageddon." Whatever you want to call it, though, the reality for PC builders right now is just grim. To put this in perspective, just take a look at our RAM price tracking post:

That's right: 128GB DDR5 kits are fully ten times more expensive than the lowest price we've ever seen. Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we'd like. You're still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year.

To reinforce the point, I pulled the latest average price data from PCPartPicker, comparing where we are today (August 2026) to exactly one year ago. This data is somewhat approximate, but it should be broadly accurate.

The numbers speak for themselves; in just 12 months, the cost of DDR5 memory has essentially exploded. We are looking at year-over-year increases nearing 500% for high-capacity kits. A standard 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 kit that would have cost you under $200 last summer is now demanding over $1,100. It is a 5x multiplier on a component that used to be a fairly boring and predictable line item in a PC build budget.

If you plan to just wait it out on an older AM4 or LGA1700 motherboard with DDR4, you'd better hope your memory holds out too, because DDR4 isn't safe from the fallout. With DDR5 entirely out of reach for most builders, the resulting scramble for older platforms running DDR4 memory has created a massive knock-on effect, and as a result, DDR4 kits are up anywhere from 120% to nearly 180% across the board. Nowhere near as bad as DDR5 pricing, but it still stings when a kit that was $105 last year is $281 this year.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the US, either. German tech site ComputerBase have also been tracking this global trend, reporting just this week that average RAM prices in Europe have skyrocketed by 345% compared to September 2025. Their data shows the squeeze is bleeding into other components too, with hard drive and SSD prices both climbing over 125% in that same timeframe.

In fact, the situation is so severe that hyperscale buyers have reportedly already locked in almost all of the global DRAM production capacity for 2027, handing over advance deposits to guarantee their supply of precious DRAM, which is now among the highest-value commodities in the world by weight; mainstream DRAM chips are worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold. PC and smartphone makers are simply fighting over the scraps, as low-priority markets compared to the extremely lucrative AI datacenter buildouts. And lucrative they are indeed; all four memory vendors (SK hynix, Samsung, Micron, and China's CXMT) have increased revenues by double, triple, or even more, all in just the space of one year.

For consumer prices to drop, we would essentially need a major contraction in the AI market, which would mean a massive correction in financial markets worldwide. Absent that, the people actually making the chips don't see an end in sight. SK Hynix CEO Kwak Noh-jung recently warned that 2027 will be the worst year for memory supply in the industry's history, forecasting that demand will outstrip their ability to produce it well into 2030. ADATA's Chairman, Simon Chen, was even more pessimistic, suggesting this DRAM crisis could last another 10 years and dismissing the idea of an "AI bubble" bursting anytime soon.

The era of cheap, plentiful memory is over, at least for now. If you need RAM today, you're either going to have to bite the bullet and pay the premium, or learn to get by with less. Make sure you check out our RAM price tracking post for the best deals we found on memory, as well as some tips on how to secure solid deals yourself.

What could possibly go wrong when you try to steal trade secrets from a restricted facility using a 360-degree action camera hidden in snacks? Forgetting to turn off the device’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi transmitters, as it turns out.

A senior engineer at Nanya Technology has been indicted in Taiwan for allegedly copying 32 files containing information about the company's DRAM manufacturing process, reports Freedom Times. The engineer was reportedly in talks with Chinese recruitment agencies and allegedly planned to pass Nanya's trade secrets to its next employer in the People's Republic in exchange for higher compensation.

Yeh Yen-wei, a senior engineer in the Advanced Process Development Division at Nanya, joined the company in 2022 and began to communicate with Chinese recruiters in 2025 to explore employment opportunities in the People's Republic. Sometime in mid-February 2026, he submitted his resignation. However, before leaving the company in mid-April, on March 28, April 4, and April 5 — during weekends and either late at night or early in the morning — he visited the company's restricted office areas with his Insta360 X4 Air action camera hidden among snacks to get it past security checks.

Once inside, Yeh used his legitimate account credentials to access Nanya's virtual machines and opened various internal research and development documents. He then used the camera to capture photographs and video of information associated with Nanya's DRAM process technologies and production methods. It goes without saying that he retained the information when he officially resigned from Nanya in mid-April.

However, his actions did not go unnoticed. Nanya's IT security team detected 'abnormal' wireless signals inside the company's restricted facilities (i.e., identified the device using its Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi signals) and tied them to the employee's access records and activity logs. Eventually, Nanya reported the suspected theft to Taiwanese authorities, which led to an indictment.

The New Taipei District Prosecutors Office charged Yeh under Taiwan's Trade Secrets Act with unauthorized reproduction of trade secrets intended for use in China, an offense for which he faces up to 10 years in prison, as well as with breach of trust under the Criminal Code. Meanwhile, forensic examination of the seized equipment uncovered no evidence that Yeh had successfully transmitted Nanya's confidential information to a Chinese company or anyone outside the company, so he could potentially get off easy.

Unfazed by the ongoing memory shortage, G.Skill has launched the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 memory kit, equipped with AMD's EXPO Ultra Low Latency (ULL) feature, to position it as a serious contender among the best RAM options.

EXPO 1.2 may seem like a minor specification update, but ULL is nothing to sneeze at. Among all the features, it brings a new level of optimization of memory sub-timings that were previously neglected. These memory sub-timings are key to increasing the performance on Ryzen processors. Standard AMD EXPO memory kits typically leave these memory sub-timings alone for the sake of broader compatibility. However, new EXPO ULL-certified memory kits, like the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30, leverage these secondary and tertiary memory sub-timings to unlock additional performance from AMD's Ryzen chips.

If you have seen one Trident Z5 memory module, you have seen them all because every new Trident series that comes out follows a similar design recipe as the very first Trident DDR5 memory modules. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. The design has been a winning formula for G.Skill's Trident Z5 memory modules, and it has resonated well among enthusiasts.

In the case of the Trident Z5 NeoX, G.Skill went with a single-color exterior. Depending on the SKU, the memory modules are available in matte black, matte white, or a sleek glossy black finish. Regardless of which colorway you choose, the overall design language remains largely identical. The only subtle difference lies in the logo placement. On the glossy black variant, the logo is on the right side, while on the matte versions, it resides in the center of the memory module.

Since it essentially utilizes the standard blueprint for every Trident Z5 memory module, the NeoX maintains a height of 1.65 inches (42mm). You are unlikely to run into clearance issues with large CPU air coolers. When it comes to aesthetics, the only RGB lighting present is the diffused light bar running along the top edge of the memory module. G.Skill provides its proprietary Trident Z Lighting Control software for customization, but you can use the motherboard software suites from all major brands, including Asus Aura Sync, Gigabyte RGB Fusion 2.0, MSI Mystic Light Sync, or ASRock Polychrome Sync.

It is a dual-channel memory kit, so each memory module is 16GB in capacity. The memory modules employ a black PCB with a single-sided design and a single-rank layout. There are eight integrated circuits (ICs), each with a capacity of 2GB, on one side of the PCB. The ICs themselves are H5CG48MEBD-X014 (M-die) from SK hynix and are well-regarded in the overclocking community. The power management integrated circuit (PMIC), which handles the power delivery, is from ANPEC, specifically the APW8502C-VBA50.

Like most enthusiast-grade memory kits, the Trident Z5 NeoX modules default to the JEDEC DDR5-4800 specification, with relaxed timings of 40-40-70 to ensure maximum compatibility. Since it is a memory kit for AMD systems, there are only EXPO profiles onboard. The primary EXPO profile corresponds to ULL, and it is clearly labeled as such within the BIOS for easy identification. It will set memory to DDR5-6000 speeds with 30-38-38-23 timings at 1.35V. The secondary EXPO profile keeps the data rate and operating voltage the same but dials back the tRAS to 96 clock cycles, probably to enhance stability for users who cannot get the ULL profile to work. See our PC Memory 101 feature and How to Shop for RAM story for more timings and frequency considerations.

Comparison Hardware

The Intel system features the Core Ultra 9 285K processor and the MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X motherboard with firmware version 7E20v1AA0. Conversely, the AMD system utilizes the Ryzen 9 9900X processor and the MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi motherboard with firmware version 7E49v1AA3. The Corsair iCUE Link Titan 360 RX LCD CPU liquid-cooling solution efficiently maintains optimal temperatures for both the Arrow Lake and Zen 5 processors, ensuring efficient thermal management across platforms.

The MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16GB Gaming X Trio efficiently handles demanding graphics workloads, preventing any bottlenecks during our gaming RAM benchmarks. The TeamGroup A440 Lite PCIe 4.0 SSD balances performance and capacity, delivering 2TB of ultra-fast storage with speeds up to 7,400 MB/s—perfect for Windows 11 24H2 installations, benchmarking software, and gaming applications.

The Corsair RM1000x Shift ATX 3.0 power supply delivers reliable and ample power to our test systems, directly supporting the GeForce RTX 4080 via its native 16-pin (12VHPWR) cable. The Streacom BC1 open-air test bench offers flexible, tool-free accommodation for all hardware components, streamlining assembly and component swaps.

Intel Performance

The results from our testing clearly demonstrated that the NeoX does not perform to its full potential when paired with an Intel-based system. The NeoX specifically targets AMD platforms, so the ULL optimizations are not available on an Intel system. That is not to say that the NeoX was slow.

On the contrary, even without access to ULL, the NeoX proved to be a strong competitor. It performed well in the 7-Zip compression workload, where it was up to 7% faster than the slowest memory kit. However, there are better and more affordable options for Intel users, such as the Vengeance RGB DDR5-6000 C30, the Ripjaws S5 DDR5-6000 C32, or the Deltaα RGB DDR5-6000 C38.

AMD Performance

It was a different story entirely when on an AMD platform, an environment where the NeoX thrived. On average, the NeoX posted results that were 3% faster than the Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 C30, its non-ULL counterpart, and 9% faster than the Lancer RGB DDR5-6000 C40, one of the first DDR5 memory kits when the standard debuted. While a 3% to 9% performance lead appears modest, it is important to highlight that some workloads benefited more than others, which balances out the average.

The advantages of ULL memory like the NeoX extend into gaming, but the degree of improvement heavily depends on the game. For example, in games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, the NeoX was right in the alley of the non-ULL competitors. In Assassin’s Creed Mirage, the NeoX showed an 8% uplift in average frame rates and a 10% improvement in 1% lows compared to the Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000 C30. Watch Dogs: Legion exhibited a similar pattern, with the NeoX delivering 8% higher average frame rates and 10% better 1% lows than its non-ULL equivalent.

Overclocking and Latency Tuning

One of the upsides of the NeoX memory kit is that it operates at the standard 1.35V commonly used by enthusiast-grade DDR5. It provides substantial headroom for those willing to experiment with overclocking. During our testing, we found that a modest bump of just 0.05V, from 1.35V to 1.40V, enabled us to stabilize the memory kit at DDR5-6200 while maintaining the same tight timings as DDR5-6000 (32-38-38-32).

The NeoX memory kit already ships with very tight timings. Nonetheless, we were curious to see how much further these timings could operate without compromising system stability. Using the same 1.4V DRAM voltage as our previous overclocking endeavor, we methodically decrementally lower the memory timings. The only stable reduction we could achieve was with tRCD and tRP, which we were able to lower by two clock cycles.

Bottom Line

There is no denying that the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is at the top echelon of DDR5 memory kits for the AMD platform. The memory kit targets the very hardcore hardware enthusiast who wants to maximize performance from their AMD processor and does not want to tinker with a standard memory kit, but more importantly, is not afraid to pay for it. While the ULL memory kit will not post double-digit uplifts, it is still important to keep expectations in check as the level of improvement over a standard memory kit varies significantly based on your combination of hardware, and remember that ULL is more for the vanilla Ryzen chip as X3D parts are unlikely to experience any perceptible gains.

Like countless other DDR5 memory kits released during this historic memory shortage, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 also falls victim to the circumstances. The memory kit launches at $629.99, so it would be wise to wait for prices to stabilize before picking one up. However, for users putting a new AMD system together from scratch or looking to upgrade their memory and want unbeatable performance at this very moment, the Trident Z5 NeoX RGB DDR5-6000 C30 is in a league of its own.

Since late 2025, RAM, storage, and graphics card prices have shot through the roof, making items that were once affordable out of reach for many people. Anyone still in the market for those parts has to rely on combo deals for any reasonable pricing. Newegg has an excellent 3-item combo running where you essentially get the 16GB of DDR5 RAM for FREE with a huge $274 discount. For only $658.99, you get the powerful Ryzen 9 9900X processor, a quality Asus X870E-Plus Wi-Fi 7 motherboard, and 2x8GB Team Group DDR5-5200 RAM, along with a free Cooler Master 240mm AIO.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The star of the combo has to be the ‘free’ RAM. The combo offers 16GB (2x8GB) of TeamGroup’s T-Force Vulkan DDR5-5200. And while the RAM speed is outside of AMD’s sweet spot, you’d be hard-pressed to notice a performance difference without looking at a frame counter. These black, non-RGB sticks will also look great with the included motherboard. If you apply the ~$274 discount to the RAM, you’re getting it for free. And if 16GB isn’t enough, buy the same kit again net 32GB for only $240.

Although we didn’t review AMD’s Ryzen 9 9900X, we know the non-X3D chips, like its big brother, the Ryzen 9 9950X, were generally well received by our reviewer and the public alike. Its strong multicore and single-threaded performance, native AVX-512 support, and backward compatibility with AM5 motherboards make this CPU an excellent choice for someone who uses their PC for more than just gaming and can make use of the additional cores and threads, as you can see from our benchmark data:

The Ryzen 9 9900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor built on TSMC’s 4nm FinFET process (6nm for the I/O die) with a base clock of 4.4 GHz and boost up to 5.6 GHz. It has a TDP of 120W and is relatively easy to manage the thermals, even when overclocking the fully unlocked processor. While overclocking isn’t what it used to be, you can still squeeze out a couple of hundred more GHz, and sometimes you can get there, even when lowering the voltage. In short, there’s a lot of performance out of the box, and even a bit more headroom left if you want to overclock.

Last, the Asus TUF Gaming X870E-Plus Wifi 7 is a solid all-around motherboard for the AM5 platform. It delivers sufficient power to support flagship-class processors and easily handles the 9850X3D in the combo, even with some overclocking. It comes with four M.2 sockets (one PCIe 5.0) and two SATA ports for storage, fast networking with integrated Wi-Fi 7 and 2,5 GbE, ample USB ports on the rear IO (13, including two USB4 40 Gbps Type-C), and a quality audio solution based on the last-gen Realtek flagship (ALC1220P). Asus’ AI solutions (AI Cache Boost, Overclocking, Cooling II, and Networking II) and the DIY-friendly design make it easy to build and get the most out of your system.

If you’re in the market for an AM5-based system that isn’t based on an X3D chip, this $658.99 combo (an incredible $274 savings) is one of the better deals available at Newegg right now. And you even get a free 240mm Cooler Master AIO. Getting RAM for what essentially amounts to ‘free’ is not something we see frequently. You can even upgrade to 32GB and still find yourself well ahead versus buying alone. Get this deal while it lasts.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has revealed that new memory architectures — once thought a commodity business — are now strategically interesting and one of his pet projects, while speaking about the comeback of the American chip industry. He further noted that the memory industry is ripe for innovation, and also hinted at exploring ways to stack memory on top of a CPU.

After years of being a commodity, memory became a strategic asset in recent quarters and will likely remain one for a while, so suddenly, leading makers of 3D NAND and DRAM became highly profitable companies, something the Intel CEO is keenly aware of:  "I used to be, 'do not invest in memory because it is a kind of commodity business,' but now it has become different," Tan said. […] "There is a lot of new technology coming out. So, we are kind of looking at one of my pet projects, some of the new memory architecture. I think you just saw the news: I hired my good friend, Seok-Hee Lee, who used to run SK Hynix. So, you kind of know something that I am thinking about. We are not ready to unfold it."

Tan did not reveal anything about the pet project and did not even specify whether the project is one of his personally favored strategic initiatives at Intel, or an initiative in one of the companies that he has invested in. He did mention that stacking memory on top of a CPU could make a lot of sense, though did not elaborate. Tan's remarks also follow the revelation of an Intel XBM patent that does away with the silicon interposer of HBM.

" I think CPU and memory, I think there are a lot of ways we can really do stacking together," Tan said. "And also try to find some new architecture for memory. I think in some way the memory, a lot of innovation are not there. So, there is some really good area."

Not everyone in the industry remembers, but Intel started as a memory company in 1968 and was quite a successful memory maker until the eighties, when Japanese companies took the lead, and Intel had to exit the market completely after suffering severe losses. Since then, the company has attempted either to return to the memory market with NAND and Optane, or at least to capitalize on a new type of memory with RDRAM. In all three cases, the company abandoned its memory initiatives without incurring significant losses.

Given the current profitability of 3D NAND and DRAM makers, producing memory is certainly a good business again and will remain profitable for some time. However, to re-enter it, companies like Intel would need capital to build at least one fab, R&D to develop competitive process technologies, and time. While licensing a technology — assuming that a company has capital — is an option, we strongly doubt that at this point Intel may be inclined to invest capital in memory and not in its core products and foundry businesses. Furthermore, it is unclear how investors react to such investments given the fact that the company struggles to become a strong competitor in the foundry market and has exited 3D NAND and 3DXPoint/Optane businesses after failing to achieve strategic targets.

Micron used to produce some of the best RAM available to mainstream users through its Crucial brand. Despite the company's exit from the consumer market through its now-defunct Crucial brand, Micron had pledged to continue honoring warranties on existing Crucial products. A recent case on Reddit, however, highlights ongoing challenges with Micron's warranty process, where it reportedly offered a customer a ludicrous payout for an RMA. Only after further communication did Micron provide an improved offer. Another user also chimed in with a similar story about an SSD return with Micron. We have reached out to Micron for comment.

Redditor Key_Tailor6948, who shared the email exchange with Tom's Hardware, recently shared their RMA experience with Micron's warranty process after encountering a failing memory module from a 48GB (2x24GB) DDR5 memory kit. While the Redditor did not specify the exact model of the memory kit, Crucial used to sell two such kits in this capacity: the Crucial Pro DDR5-6000 C48 and the Crucial Pro DDR5-5600 C46. The last known pricing for the memory kits was $489.99 and $459.99, respectively, during the memory shortage.

According to the Redditor, Micron allegedly said in an email that the company is no longer offering replacement products for warranty claims. Instead, Micron purportedly stated it would provide a refund based on the original purchase price, including taxes where applicable. However, the proposed refund amount was $241.86.

The major issue at hand is that the reimbursement Micron offered was based on the cost of the 48GB memory kit purchased before the recent memory shortage and the resulting price hikes. Nowadays, the most affordable 48GB DDR5 memory kit available on the market, such as a DDR5-6400 C32 one, which is faster than Micron’s discontinued offerings, starts at a staggering $649.99. The refund Micron proposed amounts to just 37% of the current market value for a somewhat comparable product. The Redditor's math about being 17% of market value and estimating similar-capacity memory kits going for “roughly $1,400" is a bit off based on verifiable pricing, but the proposed payment was still well short of current market value.

Beyond the disappointment over the low reimbursement, the Redditor expressed frustration that they had to send back the entire 48GB memory kit, even though only one of the two modules was faulty. This meant parting with a memory module that was still fully functional. Unfortunately, this is a common industry practice. Most manufacturers require the return of the full memory kit for warranty claims. It is exceedingly rare for companies to allow returns or replacements of only a single memory module from a multi-module kit, regardless of whether the other module is working perfectly. (EDIT 8/11/2026 : Micron's warranty states that it will either replace a product under warranty or refund the current market value of the product or the amount of the original purchase cost, whichever is lower. Therefore, Micron's offer is within the bounds of its warranty.)

The Redditor was also not happy about covering the shipping costs to return the defective memory module. This is another policy that varies widely among brands: some manufacturers cover all shipping fees, others split the cost, so you cannot really single out Micron in that aspect.

It would seem that Micron subsequently offered a more favorable resolution. The company agreed to send the user three Crucial Pro DDR5-6400 C32 16GB (CP16G64C32U5B) memory modules as a replacement. This solution matches the original capacity of 48GB and also delivers better performance than the user's original memory kit. The user accepted the offer.

Meanwhile, Crucial SSD owners are seemingly experiencing similar RMA practices from Micron. A Reddit user named LeanaIsTheBest highlighted in the same thread that Micron is allegedly refusing to provide direct replacements for a failing 4TB SSD. Instead, the company ostensibly offered a gift card equivalent to the original purchase price of the 4TB SSD as compensation. However, the company provided an alternate option to receive the same amount in cash through PayPal or Venmo, with the condition that the user pays the 6% transaction fee.

Micron wound down its consumer business back in December 2025. It is reasonable to think the chipmaker has reshaped its manufacturing factories to cater to more profitable markets, such as data centers and the AI sector. Micron probably is not maintaining inventory or production lines for consumer products, so direct replacements are unlikely. For a company that reported revenue of $41.46 billion in its last earnings call, it isn't a great look for Micron to not reimburse the replacement cost for loyal customers who have purchased its Crucial products.

The best RAM on the market generally utilizes integrated circuits (ICs) from industry giants such as SK hynix, Samsung, or Micron. Recently, however, Chinese chipmaker ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) has emerged as a strong competitor amid the ongoing global memory shortage. In Colorful's latest overclocking exhibition, CXMT's ICs achieved speeds up to DDR5-8800 on AMD's X870E platform, keeping pace with the best overclocking ICs, such as SK hynix's A-die and M-die.

Many often regard CXMT as an underdog in the memory industry, particularly when compared to the "Big Three." Founded only a decade ago, the ambitious Chinese chipmaker eventually became China's largest domestic memory manufacturer and is now the fourth-largest memory maker globally.

The recent memory shortage has accelerated CXMT’s rise to fame. The chipmaker has been silently gaining ground in the memory market. Its momentum has been especially evident in the DDR5 segment despite the company having only unveiled its first DDR5 ICs in November 2025. Many top Chinese memory brands, including Asgard, Colorful, Gloway, and KingBank, are widely using CXMT ICs, and even Corsair has done so to a certain extent.

Colorful showed off an incredible overclock with its iGame Shadow II DDR5-6000 C34 memory kits, pushing both the 32GB (2x16GB) and 48GB (2x24GB) configurations far beyond their rated speeds. These kits reached DDR5-8812 and DDR5-8817, respectively, on Colorful's iGame X870E Vulcan W OC motherboard. Unfortunately, the screenshots provided by Colorful were too blurry to discern detailed specifications such as memory timings or DRAM voltage. For context, some high-end DDR5-8800 memory kits typically operate at timings around 42-55-55-140 with a voltage of 1.45V.

The noteworthy aspect is that Colorful achieved the overclocking feat on 16GB memory modules. Most, if not all, DDR5-8600 and faster memory kits currently on the market come with 24GB memory modules. The reason is that many use SK hynix’s 24Gb (3GB) M-die ICs, produced on the chipmaker's advanced 1a-nm (~14nm) process node with Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. These M-die ICs are the go-to choice for memory vendors thanks to their superior density, power efficiency, and ability to scale to higher frequencies.

In comparison, CXMT’s accomplishments are notable when considering the technological challenges. Due to U.S. export restrictions on China, CXMT does not have access to cutting-edge EUV equipment, so its 16nm node, which it uses for DDR5 ICs, leverages Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) machines instead. CXMT’s 16nm process is roughly in the same alley as the 1z nm (~14–15nm) nodes previously used by the Big Three, so CXMT is easily a few years behind the top-tier process nodes.

The reality is that CXMT will have to make do with what it has. The chipmaker is already developing a 1a-nm node but on DUV. It is far from prime time, though.

In addition to seeing CXMT ICs in mainstream memory kits, companies such as HP, Asus, and Acer have already started selling consumer devices, such as laptops or desktops with CXMT memory. Even Apple reportedly wants to buy memory chips from CXMT.

CXMT recently went public via IPO and saw its stock price skyrocket by 466%, raising over $8.6 billion. Without access to EUV machinery, CXMT will focus primarily on memory production and is rapidly building factories across China. The ambitious Chinese chipmaker hopes to steal 30% of the market share from the Big Three by 2030. It is just a matter of time before we start seeing CXMT ICs in all the prominent consumer memory brands.

Software performance expert, scientist, and GitHub developer Daniel Lemire compared historical computer memory prices and showed that decades of falling prices were undone in just a matter of months because of the massive demand for HBM. According to his X post, this event is a historical anomaly, and he cannot think of an instance where technology hardware prices reverted to levels from decades before.

“RAM on a per unit basis is about as expensive as it was in 2007,” Lemire said. He also added, “I do not think anyone can predict what will happen, but I am guessing that we either find a way to build AI systems without so much memory, or we find really clever ways to make much more memory much faster.”

We also checked third-party data compiled and maintained by David Shim for the Stanford DAM Project. The latest price for DDR5 memory sits between $13.28 and $11.41 per GB — the last time RAM hit this price was in 2008, when the price for DDR2 hovered by $15 and 11.00 per GB. These are based on nominal USD values, though. If we take 2024 inflation into account, the current amount for DD5 is between $12.74 and $10.94 per GB, which was last achieved in 2011, when DDR3 prices were at $11.85 per GB.

Technological advances, especially in manufacturing and miniaturization, meant that tech became cheaper over time. This has been true ever since the first general-purpose digital computer was created 80 years ago. ENIAC cost the government $400,000 in 1946, meaning it would probably cost around $6,850,297.44 today. However, its computing power equaled roughly 5,000 additions per second — by comparison, one of the cheapest smartphones you can get today, the Moto G Play, is on sale for $99.99. This smartphone is powered by a Snapdragon 680 processor with AI performance of 3.3 TOPS — that is 3.3 trillion operations per second. We can’t really compare the ENIAC to a modern processor, but it at least shows us the scale by which technology has advanced, and prices have dropped.

The massive increase in memory prices in recent times wasn’t caused by technological regression or a bottleneck in supply — instead, it’s the massive demand for HBM driven by the AI race. “The memory output is increasing by around 20% per year. Now, normally, that would be fantastically fast and amazing for any large, mature industry, but ask yourself, ‘Is the demand increasing by 20% a year?” Elon Musk said during the last SpaceX earnings call. “No, the demand is increasing by 200% a year, maybe higher.”

Other experts and industry leaders agree with Musk. The chairman of the SK Group, the holding company that owns memory chip manufacturer SK hynix, said that RAM prices are “abnormally high,” and that the industry must take steps to increase supply and lower prices. Even RAM that uses chips from Chinese manufacturer CXMT, which some people look to as a cheaper alternative, generally tracked the prices of modules that use chips from the big three (Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix).

Aside from computers, other industries are already being affected by the shortage, including graphics cards, smartphones, gaming consoles, and even automobiles. We do not know how long the current memory crisis will last, but the situation is unsustainable and “something has to give.” The scary thing is that nobody knows what would happen if and when that time comes.

Apple reportedly has around $1 billion in "processor wafers on the shelves awaiting packaging" amid ongoing memory shortages, putting pressure on the firm as it nears the launch of the iPhone 18. Tim Culpan of Culpium says Apple is "scrambling" for memory supply ahead of release, working with suppliers to get memory ready so it can finish packaging the A20 Pro and C2 chips that are reportedly inside the iPhone 18 lineup.

It's an interesting peek behind the curtain of the current supply chain limitations, which reach beyond simply DRAM chips. With fully-integrated SoCs across both desktop and mobile, Apple is uniquely vulnerable to supply chain limitations, not only in DRAM supply, but also in packaging capacity to bring together DRAM chips with processor wafers.

According to Culpan, Apple primarily sources DRAM from Micron, with smaller engagements from SK Hynix and Samsung. Micron (along with the other major memory players) has reportedly sold capacity for DRAM and HBM through 2027. A flurry of long-term agreements (LTAs) have cropped up over the past several months, guaranteeing supply to certain companies for several years.

The A20 Pro is the first chip to use TSMC's N2 process, and it has been progressing well, with TSMC reportedly sitting on around $1 billion worth of Apple wafers awaiting packaging with DRAM. Packaging happens with TSMC's new Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM) process, according to Culpan, which is similar to the CoWoS packaging but for mobile parts.

Culpan reports that "Apple and its assemblers remain confident that they can meet initial demand," but DRAM shortages could put pressure on shipments past the initial launch. Apple reportedly plans to ship around 200 million iPhone 18 units across the lineup throughout the device's lifespan. The iPhone 17 range saw record shipments last year, surpassing 245 million devices shipped in 2025.

Apple is one of several companies reportedly looking to alternative suppliers for DRAM, namely China's CXMT. The Chinese memory supplier has become a hot topic in the halls of the U.S. government over the past several weeks, with Apple reportedly lobbying for clearance as the government weighs the option to ban CXMT.

This week, Samsung presented its vision for next-generation memory and storage solutions both for AI and general-purpose applications at the Future of Memory and Storage (FMS) 2026 conference. The company introduced zHBM, zNAND-O, and BV-NAND technologies at the event, and while they are aimed at very different applications, they share one common ingredient: they all rely on wafer bonding.

Here's a breakdown of each type of technology that the company announced.

• zHBM: Samsung’s vision for custom HBM ultra-high-performance memory that will sit on top of logic dies.
• zNAND-O: NAND memory that can be bonded atop a logic device to maximize bandwidth, reduce latency, and minimize power consumption.
• BV-NAND (aka Samsung’s 10^th Generation V-NAND): Samsung’s take on bonding NAND arrays atop all the circuitry needed to operate them. This is essentially next-generation 3D NAND technology that is used today by almost everyone, including Kioxia/Sandisk, SK Hynix, and YMTC (which was the first company to adopt such a method).

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zHBM: Placing HBM stack on top of logic

Around the time we first heard about HBM4's 2,048-bit interface, we read a 'semi-official' report that SK hynix and its partners were considering vertical integration of HBM4 stacks on top of logic chips. To a large degree, companies were considering installing these memory stacks on top of their processors as they doubted that it would be possible and feasible to use interposers to connect HBM4 stacks to AI accelerators. Over time, it turned out that integration of memory on top of logic is complicated when it comes to cooling, power delivery, and developing interposers that can handle a 2,048-bit memory interface. Samsung's zHBM appears to be a continuation of that effort.

Samsung's zHBM concept places HBM directly on top of an AI accelerator instead of on its perimeter, which greatly reduces the distance data must travel between compute and memory. The company says this architecture can increase bandwidth and power efficiency and projects that it can provide 8x the 'performance of HBM5', while its advanced wafer bonding is expected to enable over 10x higher memory density, 3x better energy efficiency, and more than 50% lower thermal resistance than HBM5.

While Samsung's claims about the zHBM look incredibly impressive, they are vague. For example, when the company claims that a 'next-generation interface system incorporating zHBM' will deliver 'approximately eight times the performance of HBM5,' it never explicitly states whether this refers to memory bandwidth, actual application performance due to a combination of improvements over standard HBM, or something else. Had Samsung intended to compare raw bandwidth, it would likely have used more precise wording, such as '8x higher bandwidth.'

Instead, the general term 'performance' may have many meanings. The same applies to references of improved power efficiency, higher memory density, and lower thermal resistance compared to HBM5, a standard that has not been fully defined or ratified. To make matters even more imprecise, Samsung mentions thermal resistance, which depends on implementation rather than the standard. Finally, Samsung didn't reveal which die stacking/bonding technology it will use for zHBM.

In any case, Samsung says that zHBM will also support customer-specific designs and will enable custom IP to be integrated into the interconnect layer (which plays a role similar to the base die, though it is definitely not a base die per se) between the HBM stack and the AI processor, which essentially means that zHBM is not necessarily an industry-standard solution, so it might be implemented with additional perks.

For now, Samsung hasn't disclosed any timeframes for when it plans to offer its zHBM solutions. The only clue is that it compares it to HBM5, which is likely to see the light of day sometime in the late 2020s or early 2030s.

zNAND-O(on-device): Put storage close to compute

Samsung also unveiled zNAND-O, a high-performance NAND memory currently in development that will enable putting four or eight stacks of NAND devices on top of logic dies. zNAND-O(n) device is based on the company's V-NAND platform (or rather, BV-NAND) and is meant to combine high storage density with improved I/O performance and low latency.

Samsung claims that the tech is suitable for edge AI systems running real-time, data-intensive inference workloads, though, of course, there are many other applications that can benefit from high-performance on-package storage.

Since the technology is in development, Samsung hasn't shared much information about it, even keeping the schematics of how it plans to put zNAND-O layers on top of a logic under wraps. We can speculate that since Samsung mentions 'improved I/O performance and low-latency,' it may be planning to exploit both the inherently parallel architecture of NAND memory with a high-performance interface, though we will not try to dive into details for the sake of not making the discussion too speculative.

BV-NAND: Good old V-NAND gets a new treatment

With BV-NAND, Samsung is essentially introducing a new brand name for its next-generation 3D NAND that bonds the NAND array on top of the I/O and logic wafer. This, in turn, produces the layer itself using high-performance logic process technologies and enables higher I/O speeds.

Samsung formally announced its 400-layer-class V-NAND (aka 10^th Generation V-NAND) some time ago, and even disclosed that its areal density would be 28 Gb/mm² with a maximum I/O speed reaching 5600 MT/s. This likely stipulates the usage of a pinout that is different from the 3D NAND packages used today. While the areal density of Samsung's 10^th Gen TLC V-NAND is slightly lower when compared to that of Kioxia/Sandisk's BiCS10 TLC NAND, its maximum I/O speed is significantly higher, which perhaps justifies the new branding.

Considering the fact that Samsung rarely sells its memory to third parties and prefers to market client SSDs itself, a new brand for memory can be a sales driver, even if actual high-end drive performance is limited by a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface rather than by 3D NAND memory I/O. Then again, the performance of mid-range PCIe Gen5 SSDs that rely on a quad-channel NAND controller depends on 3D NAND I/O today, so marketing them under a new flash memory brand is a certain way to attract attention and then sell decent performance.

Samsung's new brand strategy

As the new name of the FMS tradeshow implies, the announcements touch upon very distinct industry needs. In the case of Samsung, we are talking about high-performance data center-grade AI accelerators; applications that need storage with latency that is lower than ~50 – 60 µs of modern high-end PCIe SSDs, though we will see how it compares to Z-NAND, and essentially a new generation of conventional 3D NAND with a new brand.

Except for the 400-layer-class Samsung BV-NAND that is set to hit the market in the foreseeable future, the company's new tech, like zHBM and zNAND-O, is years away.

Following its massive $8.6 billion initial public offering (IPO) in July, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) began considering building its sixth DRAM fab in China to boost memory output in the coming years, Reuters reports. If all announced projects proceed as planned, the company's production capacity could more than double in the mid-term future, the report claims. Meanwhile, investment banker Dan Niles believes China could capture 30% of the DRAM market by 2030, according to P Equity Research.

Growing at a rapid pace

CXMT currently operates three 300-mm DRAM fabs: two near Hefei and one in Beijing's Yizhuang district. Unofficial reports claim that each fab is capable of processing around 100,000 wafers per month, so the company's output may be around 300,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM).

The company is pursuing an aggressive expansion strategy and is currently building additional fabs near Shanghai and Hefei, according to Reuters. The company's sixth fab will reportedly be located in Beijing's Yizhuang area, adjacent to its existing facility. Once these projects are fully operational, the company’s total manufacturing capacity could exceed 600,000 WSPM, which will double its current output, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, researchers from Citrini believe that CXMT could exit 2026 with a capacity of 350,000 WSPM, which is just 25,000 WSPM shy of what Micron targets by the end of the year. Citrini Research models that by 2030, CXMT will have production capacity of around 950,000 WSPM.

Building three big DRAM fabs is a big deal, from both financial and execution points of view. However, it is not a secret that virtually all fabs owned by Chinese companies are built using money from local and federal governments under the 'Hefei model,' which aims to transform cities into economic juggernauts by leveraging high-risk projects. So it is not surprising that both Shanghai and Beijing have provided financial assistance and other forms of support to attract CXMT to their regions, according to Reuters.

CXMT's existing Beijing fab, operated by Changxin Jidian, received backing from E-Town Capital and Beijing E-Town Technology, both affiliated with the Yizhuang development zone, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. In fact, the district has evolved into a relatively major semiconductor manufacturing hub that already hosts CXMT, SMIC, Naura Technology, and Xiaomi, the report claims.

The right timing

The proposed fab would be located in Beijing's Yizhuang district, roughly 20 kilometers southeast of the city center, where CXMT already operates a 300-mm DRAM manufacturing facility. The planned production capacity and total capital investment for the project have not yet been disclosed, although Reuters points out that a leading-edge DRAM fab typically costs well over $10 billion.

Sources cited within the report said the company is seeking at least 60 million yuan ($8.9 million) in financial support from the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, and additional state-owned technology companies have also expressed interest in participating. Discussions remain preliminary, and neither the overall size nor the structure of the financing package has been finalized.

From CXMT's point of view, this is the right time for financial influxes as the company can sell all of its DRAM output at good prices to a variety of customers. Those being domestic PC and server makers (including Lenovo), and global brands such as Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix, which prioritize shipments of their DRAM output to the AI sector.

Apple, Dell, and HP have all reportedly qualified CXMT's memory and are ready to deploy it in their devices sold in China, while Acer and Asus have already begun to use DRAM from the Chinese maker. If CXMT signs long-term supply contracts with the world's leading PC makers, it is nearly guaranteed to sell out its output to these vendors in the coming years, which justifies investments in its expansion.

30% of DRAM market by 2030?

Dan Niles, founder of Niles Investment Management, believes that many investors underestimate how much share CXMT could capture over the coming years and how much share China may seize in the coming years.

His argument stems from historical DRAM market leadership shifts. In 1975, U.S. companies controlled 95% of the DRAM market, with Intel alone holding 75%. Japan then turned DRAM into a commodity business, increased its share to 80% by 1985, while the U.S. fell to 10% and then just 2% by 1990. Then South Korea repeated that playbook in the mid-1980s and eventually displaced Japanese suppliers, and today it accounts for roughly 62% of the global DRAM production.

With Micron's investments of hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. DRAM capacity, the country is set to regain its massive presence on the global DRAM scene; China could capture 30% of the market by 2030, according to Niles.

China already consumes around 30% of global memory output, as it produces hundreds of millions of PCs and smartphones both for domestic and global consumption; it is reasonable to expect the country to produce as much commodity memory locally as possible. Keeping in mind China's push for semiconductor self-sufficiency and willingness to invest huge amounts of money in domestic fabs, it is possible to expect the country to rapidly gain DRAM output and share. China is already pushing its chipmakers hard to start DRAM production, and the government reportedly asked CXMT to share its process technologies with others.

Not that easy

There are multiple factors — both technological and political — that may, if not stop, but greatly slow down CXMT's and China's DRAM expansions in the coming years.

First up, there are export controls in place that prevent Chinese entities from getting sophisticated wafer fab equipment required to make DRAM using 18nm-class process technology or more advanced. If the proposed MATCH Act passes, then limitations on Chinese companies will get more severe, which will reduce their expansion ability.

Secondly, even if CXMT (or another Chinese DRAM maker) finds a way to produce more advanced DRAM using relatively outdated tools (i.e., use old tools for sub-16nm nodes), they will need to acquire those tools in quantity to increase their output. Meanwhile, companies like ASML have relatively limited production capacities, and CXMT is certainly not the only memory maker seeking to expand its production capacity in the coming years. While SMEE and SiCarrier are developing lithography tools in China, they will be unlikely to ramp up production of immersion DUV scanners to higher levels any time soon.

Thirdly, building fabs is one thing; operating leading-edge DRAM production at high yields is another. China has recruited engineers from Micron, Samsung, SK hynix, and TSMC for years, but scaling from three to six or more fabs requires thousands of experienced process, yield, device, lithography, and integration engineers. Building fabs adjacent to existing sites enables CXMT and other chipmakers to share experience and knowledge internally, which helps to develop experienced talent. But will it be enough for the long term?

Next, expanding wafer capacity alone is insufficient. DRAM producers must continuously migrate to finer process technologies (e.g., 16nm-class, 14nm-class, 12nm-class) to remain cost-competitive. If export controls delay access to equipment or materials needed for these nodes, Chinese fabs could end up producing more wafers at a higher cost per bit than competitors.

Finally, some American lawmakers want to prohibit U.S.-based companies from acquiring memory from CXMT and other Chinese vendors. They have every reason to believe that China wants to take control of a sizeable DRAM market share in a bid to use it in its strategic interest and have leverage over the market, something the country already has with rare earth metals. If the lawmakers manage to turn the proposal into law, demand for CXMT's and other China-made DRAM will drop. It will probably be sufficient inside China, but whether it will be enough to justify 10 or more big DRAM fabs is a different question.

In May of this year, Microsoft said that 32GB of RAM is now the future-proof “no worries” configuration if you’re a gaming enthusiast, and that 16GB of RAM is now the new “practical starting point” if you want to have a smooth experience with Windows 11. However, it seems that the company is backtracking on this announcement as it removes all references to the post on the Windows Learning Center website, according to Windows Latest.

Microsoft previously posted a blog titled “How to optimize your gaming PC setup” in November 2025, where it said that 32GB is the ideal capacity for hardcore gamers who demand the best possible quality for AAA games or use mods a lot. However, this page is no longer available, and people who attempt to visit the link are automatically redirected to the Learning Center Homepage.

Many manufacturers are once again releasing laptops that just have 8GB of RAM. Microsoft is part of this move, as it dropped its budget Surface Go and Surface Laptop Go models and introduced 8GB base versions of its Surface Pro 12, Surface Laptop 13, and Surface Laptop for Business. Thankfully, Redmond is not leaving users who cannot afford expensive RAM out to dry, as it recently promised to optimize the operating system and reduce its footprint by this year.

Even though Windows 11’s minimum specifications just require 4GB, the prevalence of many web-based apps and interfaces on the OS use up a lot of memory on many systems. While using web-based React and WebView2 is easier for developers, they’re not as efficient as apps that are built to run natively on Windows. This wasn’t a problem when memory was cheap and plentiful, as people could just spend a few dollars to upgrade their Windows PCs. However, now that memory modules are expensive and it’s hard to find the best prices for DDR5 and DDR4 kits, developers are going to be forced to optimize their software to use as little memory as possible.

This was actually what Windows programmers had to do in the 1980s and 1990s, when every Microsoft engineer had a stopwatch to ensure that their work remained fast, even on the limited hardware of the time. Even the original Task Manager, which was built by the same person who integrated ZIP file support into Windows, was only 80KB big so that it could run smoothly on “potato” hardware.

Hopefully, both Microsoft and app developers will rise to the challenge brought about by the memory shortage and make Windows efficient once more. This is especially true as Microsoft is now facing some competition from macOS and Linux (although Windows is, by far, still the most popular operating system today).

Pushback against Micron's planned manufacturing complex in Clay, New York, which comprises four separate fabs, is once again at the center of an environmental lawsuit. Filed by Neighbors for a Better Micron and Jobs to Move America — the same groups that filed a separate lawsuit against Micron in January — filed a new complaint Friday, claiming that approved wastewater and air permits aren't valid and will allow Micron to leak "forever chemicals" into the Oneida River.

"The Permits were issued against eh backdrop of the significant environmental consequences already acknowledged through the course of the Micro Project's State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) review. including the release of PFAS and other highly persistent and hazardous chemicals," the complaint reads. "Rather than fully and meaningfully evaluate and address those consequences and impose the necessary protections before granting final authorization, [the Department of Environmental Conservation] issued permits that defer essential analyses, controls and limitations, and mitigation decisions until after issuance or until future regulations and studies have been conducted."

The lawsuit names the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Onondaga County (where Clay is located), and Micron. Its claim is that, despite Micron receiving wastewater and air permits from the DEC, those permits aren't adequate to regulate the plant's emissions. In one part of the lawsuit, the petitioners claim the permits are "not routine operating approvals," and in another, claim the loose permit guidelines "are not collateral or technical omissions."

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, otherwise known as PFAS or "forever chemicals," are synthetic chemicals that are essential to semiconductor manufacturing. The chemicals are present throughout nearly the entirety of the manufacturing chain, necessitating strict water and air containment management to align with environmental regulations. "The SPDES permit authorizes the acceptance and discharge of Micron's industrial wastewater containing identified emerging contaminants, including PFAS compounds, but it imposes no substantive controls on those harmful contaminants beyond monitoring their presence and concentration."

In January, the two petitioners named in this complaint filed another lawsuit against Micron, claiming that the project failed to comply with the state's environmental review process. Last month, Micron asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit. It's still set for oral arguments on August 25, however.

This lawsuit currently doesn't have a date set for oral arguments, if it ever reaches that point. The petitioners are seeking the nullification of both wastewater and air permits, which would force Micron back under the environmental review process, and costs associated with the suit.

Storage and memory manufacturer Lexar has listed a new 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-7200 CL38 memory kit in China with a price tag of 3,999 yuan (roughly $592). Part of the second-generation Thor RGB series, the kit features a sandblasted aluminum heat spreader, thermal pads, and eight LEDs that support a variety of RGB lighting effects. It is rated for 38-48-48-86 timings at 1.40V and supports both Intel XMP 3.0 and AMD EXPO profiles.

Lexar says the modules use carefully selected domestically produced DRAM, although it does not specify the actual manufacturer. While there is no confirmation, the company may be using DRAM chips made by CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies). Lexar has also published a compatibility list covering 43 motherboards, including 30 Asus models and 13 MSI models across Intel Z890, Intel B860, and AMD B850 platforms. The compatibility list also includes supported boards for a faster 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-7600 CL38 memory kit.

Interestingly, none of AMD's X870 or previous-generation motherboards appear on the list. That said, the kit should work on most DDR5 boards that Lexar hasn't tested, but the absence of AMD's flagship consumer chipset from the compatibility list is a bit odd. Notably, major motherboard manufacturers, including MSI and Gigabyte, have already started optimizing their motherboards to support CXMT memory ICs.

A few months ago, Corsair began adopting CXMT DDR5 chips in select memory kits, including its popular Vengeance lineup. Likewise, major PC manufacturers such as HP and Dell have started qualifying CXMT DRAM, while Acer and Asus have reportedly asked their Chinese manufacturing partners to source locally made memory chips.

The arrival of CXMT-made DDR5 chips earlier this year raised hopes that a new DRAM supplier could ease supply constraints and eventually lower memory prices. So far, there seems to be little evidence of that happening. At around $592, Lexar's new DDR5-7200 kit is priced in line or only slightly below many comparable 32GB DDR5-7200 kits currently available in the U.S. Similar kits from brands such as G.Skill, Corsair, and Kingston are currently selling anywhere from $585 to $700.

There’s been a shift toward using a single DIMM of DDR5 to skirt the worst of the RAM pricing crisis. AMD has suggested to us previously, at least, that it’s an option PC builders are exploring, and it’s a wrinkle that’s shown up in dozens of prebuilts; one that we’ve been careful to avoid when recommending products, particularly during peak shopping events. But just how much gaming performance are you giving up with a single DIMM when using one of the best CPUs for gaming?

The conventional wisdom is that you’re giving up quite a bit of performance, resting on the ideas of previous DDR generations, where going down a single stick will cut your bandwidth in half. The same is true with DDR5, but things are a bit messier, which we’ll dig into later.

At a high level, using a single DDR5 DIMM doesn’t compromise gaming performance by nearly as much as you might expect. We saw drops of around 8% to 10% across Intel and AMD CPUs, and less than a 5% difference with AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

A proper dual-channel configuration is still the way to go for optimal performance. However, our testing shows that even a single DDR5 DIMM offers superior performance to dual-channel DDR4 on CPUs that support both memory generations.

Using a single DIMM isn’t ideal, and it brings up compatibility issues if you plan on adding another DIMM down the line (another area we’ll touch more on in-depth later). But as a stopgap measure amid surging DRAM prices, a single DIMM of DDR5 holds up surprisingly well in gaming scenarios, and it represents a nice on-ramp into a DDR5 platform while prices are out of control.

Testing single-DIMM DDR5 in games

The geomean below speaks for itself. Moving down to a single DIMM drops some performance, but it’s not nearly as stark as I expected. There are some important notes about how we tested before dissecting the results, however.

As usual, we tested at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings, using Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition to minimize the influence of the GPU. That’s even more important here, as we’re not evaluating CPUs but the memory that feeds the CPU. We're looking at a separate GPU and CPU here, as well; dual-channel memory is vital if you're using an iGPU.

We also wanted to create a realistic testing scenario. Assuming you’re going for a 2x16GB configuration, that means starting with a single 16GB DIMM, not a 32GB one. That’s what we did here. Our single-DIMM configurations run with just 16GB of memory, while dual-DIMM configurations run with 32GB. Capacity isn’t a major limitation for our testing here, though it will pose performance issues if you’re running several applications alongside your game.

The Ryzen 5 7600X was our biggest loser, dropping 10.9% of its average performance across our 13-game geomean with a single 16GB DIMM. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, meanwhile, dropped 8.7% of its average performance, while the Core i5-14600K similarly dropped 8.3% of its performance. The 1% lows are especially notable here, scaling with average performance rather than falling off a cliff.

Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D fared the best, dropping just 2.8% of its performance on average. As you’ll see through our individual game tests, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D shows identical performance with two DIMMs and a single DIMM in multiple games. The large and speedy L3 minimizes the impact of using a single DIMM, giving AMD’s 3D V-Cache CPUs another notch in their belt (as if they needed another).

Our other geomeans don’t say much. A single-DIMM configuration consumes a few watts less, leading to slightly lower efficiency when balanced against the lowered performance.

007 First Light, the newest game in our test suite, shows good scaling across our test pool, so it’s a good place to start. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus dropped 8.9% of its performance with a single DIMM, while the 9800X3D dropped 6.5%. The 14600K is worth highlighting here. A single DIMM lost us 7.9%, but that’s still better than dual-channel DDR4, and by a decent 6.8% margin.

This trend is fairly consistent, too. Starfield is punishing for single-DIMM configurations, with the 14600K losing 10.6% of its average performance. Even then, a single DDR5 DIMM is 6.9% faster than dual-channel DDR4. Intel platforms can scale up to high data rates, and we use 7,200 MT/s for Intel chips. With slower speeds, the performance will equalize. Still, I’d strongly consider a single DDR5 DIMM if you’ve been eyeing an LGA 1700 platform with DDR4, assuming you’re primarily focused on gaming.

Starfield shows the benefits of 3D V-Cache in this single-DIMM configuration clearly. While the performance losses with other CPUs are brutal in this title, the 9800X3D dropped just a few frames, a 1.6% decrease in average performance.

Doom: The Dark Ages is similarly harsh on single-DIMM configurations. The Ryzen 5 7600X dropped 17.3% of its average performance, and the 270K Plus fell by 14%. The 9800X3D holds up well, however, with just a 4.2% average performance loss. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (in the gallery below) shows a similar dynamic.

However, the addition of 3D V-Cache mainly helps in these games where we see bigger losses with other CPUs. There are several games in our suite where the performance loss between a single DIMM and dual-channel configuration was minor, particularly in GPU-heavy titles. The Last of Us Part One shows that in action.

Similarly, the performance loss is minor in Counter-Strike 2, just a handful of frames even north of 600 FPS. Even the Core i5-14600K, which was hit the hardest by far, dropped just 5.9% of its average performance (and it’s still faster than a dual-channel DDR4 configuration).

You can browse the results of the other games we tested in the gallery above, though they tell much the same story as the titles we highlighted. The two biggest learnings from this testing are that a single, fast DDR5 DIMM often outpaces dual-channel DDR4, and that AMD’s 3D V-Cache can smooth over the rough edges of using a single DIMM, particularly in those memory-sensitive titles.

How we tested

We tested on our normal test bed that we use for CPU reviews, with the only difference being dropping one of our DIMMs. As usual, we enabled XMP/EXPO for testing, both on single- and dual-DIMM configurations, opting for higher speeds on Intel platforms. AMD’s sweet spot is around 6,000 MT/s.

The data rate is noteworthy for the DDR4 comparison, in particular. With slower DDR5, we expect the delta between dual-channel DDR4 and single-DIMM DDR5 to decrease.

In addition to enabling XMP/EXPO, we disable Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), enable Resizeable BAR, and disable any automatic overclocking features that aren’t covered by warranty, including AMD’s Precision Boost Overdrive and Intel’s Extreme performance profile.

Complexities of DDR5

DDR5 has much higher data rates compared to DDR4 (2x or more), and that’s the result of significantly more complexity on DDR5 DIMMs compared to DDR4. Notably for this testing are the two 32-bit subchannels of DDR5, as well as enlarged prefetch and bank groups. You are getting half the total bandwidth with a single DDR5 DIMM, absolutely, but it’s a little more nuanced than simply running your memory in a single-channel configuration.

DDR4 uses a single 72-bit channel, and 64 of those bits transfer data (the additional 8 are for ECC). With DDR5, you get two 40-bit subchannels, 32 of which are used for data transfer. Critically, these subchannels have their own Command/Address (CA) interface, allowing them to operate independently of each other.

In addition, DDR5 doubles the prefetch size to 16N, doubles the number of banks and bank groups, and increases burst length from 8 bytes to 16 bytes. The math here is straightforward enough. With DDR4, you can transfer 64 bits of data over the interface at a burst of 8 bytes, giving you 64 bytes of data and aligning with cache line sizes. Each of the subchannels in DDR5 can transfer 64 bytes of data, as well, with a 32-bit width and burst length of 16 bytes.

It’s pseudo-dual-channel memory on a single DIMM. There are two independent memory operations that can happen each cycle, both of which transfer 64 bytes of data. That is a big reason why even a single DDR5 DIMM (particularly one with a higher data rate) can outpace even a proper dual-channel DDR4 configuration.

The common wisdom about using a single DIMM comes mainly from previous DDR generations, where you can only get that single 64-byte transfer each cycle, necessitating a second DIMM to have two independent operations.

Let me be clear: two DDR5 DIMMs are still better. Instead of two operations per cycle, you can perform four. The main difference is that, for modern CPUs and games, just those two operations give you the vast majority of your performance, and you don’t run into a massive performance bottleneck as you do with just a single operation via DDR4. After all, there are still a lot of DDR4 systems out there.

On the issue of compatibility

The elephant in the room with upgrading to a DDR5 platform with a single DIMM is compatibility. If you get a single DDR5 DIMM now, you should plan to add another in the future. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of easy answers when it comes to combining two DIMMs that aren’t in a kit together. It should work, but mixing and matching can lead to stability issues and/or lowered performance.

Generally, combining two DIMMs of the same spec should work. For instance, if you bought this Patriot Viper Venom DDR5-6000 CL30 DIMM to start your new build, and then bought a second one later, it should work. “Should” carries a lot of weight on its shoulders, however. Maybe Patriot sources DRAM from multiple places, or your second DIMM’s timings don’t completely align with your first. That could cause stability or performance issues.

There have been some attempts to get past this hurdle, such as the ROG Certified program with select Asus motherboards, but it’s impossible to know for sure if two separate DIMMs will work together or not without testing. The best you can do is to make sure you buy the same brand of memory, with the same spec, if you add a second DIMM. Make sure to keep your receipt handy in the event you need to return it, as well.

Once you have your second DIMM, make sure to test it first at stock JEDEC speeds/timings (no XMP/EXPO). Run games or applications you normally run, and then use a utility like MemTest64 to check for stability. I’d recommend keeping your PC running in this state for a few days to see if any BSODs, application crashes, or poor performance issues pop up. After that’s done, repeat the process with XMP/EXPO enabled, assuming you’re using matching DIMMs (incompatible XMP/EXPO profiles won’t work together).

Assuming DRAM prices continue at an elevated rate before you upgrade, you may want to consider investing in a dual-channel kit down the line and selling your single DIMM. Even kits can run into compatibility issues, though the likelihood is far, far lower.

Memory supply from major DRAM manufacturers to independent module makers could drop to just 30% of the amount supplied in 2026 next year, according to C.K. Chang, CEO of Taiwanese memory vendor Apacer, further tightening an already squeezed supply chain.

Chang made the comments during the company's 1H 2026 investor conference on July 24, and in subsequent media interviews after the conference. Although memory price increases are expected to slow during the second half of 2026 — reportedly due to consumers deciding that RAM is too expensive — he believes severe shortages will persist into at least the middle of 2027, and that DRAM will remain the most constrained segment.

According to Chang, the greatest risk facing Apacer, which buys memory wafers from manufacturers such as SK Hynix and Samsung and turns them into finished memory products, is no longer overpaying for the chips, but failing to obtain any supply at all.

In preparation for growing shortages and to prevent a wider shortfall next year, the company says it grew its inventory to NT$12.4 billion ($383.2 million USD) at the end of June, up from NT$8.38 billion ($259 million USD) one quarter earlier, representing an increase of approximately 48%. The company is also arranging a five-year syndicated loan of up to NT$4 billion ($123.6 million USD) to purchase additional chips whenever manufacturers make them available, among other needs.

Chang’s projection does not mean worldwide DRAM production will fall by more than 70%. His statement specifically refers to the volume major chip manufacturers may allocate to downstream module companies such as Apacer, which purchases memory chips and packages them into DIMMs, SSDs and embedded storage products. DRAM manufacturers are increasingly reserving their output for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), server memory, and other products purchased directly by large AI and cloud customers.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — the world's biggest memory chip makers — are prioritizing higher-margin HBM and advanced server memory as AI infrastructure spending consumes an increasing share of available manufacturing capacity. Chang estimates that approximately 60% of DRAM capacity is now directed toward server-related applications, leaving conventional DDR4 and DDR5 products competing for a shrinking portion of the market.

DDR5 RDIMM server modules have received some of the most aggressive price increases and retain the greatest potential for future mark-ups, according to Chang. Demand from AI servers, enterprise storage, industrial computers and edge AI systems remains strong, while consumer PC and smartphone demand is considerably weaker and more sensitive to rising component costs. That weaker demand is, of course, mostly in comparison to the AI industry. Consumer demand remains strong enough to mop up the shrinking supply. The RAM shortage is now reportedly affecting the price of cars, far beyond consumer electronics.

NAND flash is also being pulled into the AI boom. High-capacity enterprise SSDs are increasingly being used for model storage, data staging and key-value cache offloading, allowing colder portions of AI workloads to spill out of expensive DRAM. Flash cannot replace DRAM outright because it offers considerably lower bandwidth, but it can still serve as a tier within AI memory systems, increasing demand for enterprise SSDs and NAND alongside server memory.

Chang expects DRAM contract prices to rise by approximately 30% during the third quarter of 2026 and NAND flash to increase by more than 20%. He expects price growth to moderate again during the fourth quarter.

Elsewhere, analysts project a 40% increase in DRAM prices in Q3 2026, even as demand extends to the oldest standards still in production. Samsung and SK Hynix, both South Korean companies — who together with US-based Micron Technologies control over 90% of the global DRAM market — had earlier warned that shortages could last beyond 2027. And the CEO of Adata projects that the global DRAM shortage will run for another 10 years.

Chinese manufacturers are not expected to provide immediate relief. Chang said Chinese memory maker CXMT’s DDR5 products had become competitive and that both CXMT and Chinese NAND producer YMTC had narrowed their pricing gaps with established international suppliers. However, domestic demand in China already exceeds available supply, while capacity expansion, manufacturing yields, product validation and platform compatibility continue to limit their ability to change the global balance. Furthermore, the prices of new DRAM modules from CXMT are reportedly similar to those of the big three.

Stockpiling memory inventory at historically high prices carries the risk of substantial losses if the market suddenly reverses. Apacer, however, says it has seen no evidence of an approaching collapse. For now, the company is betting that possessing expensive memory in 2027 will be considerably better than having no memory to sell at all.

On the eve of August, 2026, the DIY PC building market looks bleaker than ever. Over the last 12 months, enthusiasts have endured spiralling prices on DDR4 and DDR5, as well as hard drives and SSDs, driven by shortages induced by massive AI buildouts. But just how bad is the RAM market in 2026, and is it at all possible to buy cheap RAM these days? The short answers are “bad” and “not really, no.” In this brief 2026 ‘State of the Union’ on the RAM market, we observe just how much prices have changed in the last 12 months, and examine whether there really is any hope for PC builders at all.

It was around July last year that the alarm bells really started ringing when it came to RAM pricing, with TrendForce warning of 45% increases in the second half of the year. Until then, both RAM and SSDs had been something of an afterthought when it came to PC building. Not that those components weren’t important, but rather that you knew you could always find a cheap 32GB DDR5 kit and a decent SSD for whichever build you were planning. The tough decisions were choosing between AMD and Intel’s respective platforms, and trying to find a decent graphics card.

So what has happened since?

What a difference a year makes

To see the impact of the AI crunch on RAM pricing, I had a bit of a dig through the Tom’s Hardware archives, but I should warn you: It’s not pleasant reading. This time last year, we had just come through the throes of Amazon’s 2025 Prime Day event, held in July as opposed to this year’s June offering. As is customary, we offered our thoughts on a great PC build using Prime Day discount parts featuring a Crucial Pro 32GB DDR5 6000 memory kit, reduced from $119 to just $90. One year later, that very same kit now costs $459. That’s if you can even buy one, of course, as there was only one left in stock when I wrote this. Oh, also, Crucial no longer exists. Feeding the AI machine is proving so lucrative that Micron literally wound up its consumer memory and SSD offering so that it could put all of its efforts into HBM and enterprise.

The story is similar wherever you look. Our pick for the best RAM for gaming in 2026 remains G.Skill’s Trident Z5 Neo RGB DDR5-6000. When we reviewed this kit back in 2023, we bemoaned that users were paying the early adopter DDR5 tax. The price? A paltry $179. You now can’t buy 32GB of DDR5 for less than $379. G.SKill’s kit subsequently sank in price to an even $100; in August 2026 it’ll cost you $599.99. I guess you could call that a late adopter tax.

Even 16GB of DDR5 6000 will set you back more than $200 these days, which is double the price for half the capacity you could buy a year ago. Large kits, like Corsair’s Vengeance 192GB (4x48GB) offering, now cost upwards of $2,600, more than most pre-built PCs.

The death of Crucial

As mentioned, one of the most pertinent death knells of the RAM market in the last 12 months was the end of Crucial. In December, Micron announced that it was winding up its entire consumer offering, reallocating all of its resources to enterprise DRAM and SSDs. Crucial products have slowly died off since, and the very few kits and drives that remain are extremely expensive to buy. The company is continuing to honor warranty and technical support obligations, at least, but that will be of little comfort to PC builders left out in the cold. “Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” Micron admitted bluntly at the time.

The return of DDR4

Not totally oblivious to the plight of gamers, a few vendors are at least trying to assuage gamers and the DIY market, notably with the return of DDR4. Admittedly, this isn’t super comforting — I can’t imagine many console gamers would be thrilled about Sony solving PlayStation 5 shortages by bringing back the PS4 — but the gulf between DDR4 and DDR5 isn’t so bad that it’s not a viable option for some in 2026. We’ve heard rumblings that Intel is preparing a surprise Raptor Lake Next return for 2027, and AMD recently rolled out its 10th anniversary edition of its 5800X3D gaming CPU. Still, the best gaming CPU for DDR4 that money can buy still costs $350, and the gulf between DDR4 and DDR5 is widening, in our testing. As our resident CPU analyst Jake Roach noted at the time, buying a Ryzen 5 7600X3D and 16GB of DDR5-6000 is only $80 more expensive than buying a DDR4-based 5800X3D.

The problem lies therein: DDR4 memory prices have also skyrocketed. A 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200 kit from 2019 would have set you back 48 bucks last year. Now, you’ll be lucky to find it on sale for $200.

Prebuilt your way out of this mess

Pre-built PCs from OEM vendors like HP, as well as bespoke offerings from CyberPower and the like, are not immune to rising prices, nor are gaming laptops. To return to our one-year flashback, an Intel Core 7 Alienware Aurora 16 we recommended to users at $1,099 during July 2025 will now set you back $1,999, and we’ve seen price increases on Alienware desktops of up to $2,000 in recent months. In fact, Maingear started offering “Bring Your Own RAM” builds late last year, rather than absorbing the cost of price rises.

With that being said, if you have given up hope of getting RAM and doing a DIY build in 2026, there are still pre-built gaming PCs on sale that get you a lot of PC for your money. Perhaps more money than you might have paid last year, but in reality it's a simple math problem. RAM prices have risen by 400, 500, or even 600% in some cases in recent months, while PC builds as a whole have increased, but not by nearly as much. When you factor in the increased cost of SSDs and GPUs, pre-builts in 2026 tend to represent much better value than they generally would have a year ago.

If you’re set on buying RAM?

If you are set on building a PC right now and buying RAM to put inside it, what’s the state of play? The going rate for 16GB of DDR5 RAM is $209, the lowest amount of money you can expect to pay for a 16GB kit. For 32GB, the going rate is $379. Per GB, 32GB remains better value, at around $12 rather than $13. 64GB of DDR5 from Corsair is $699, ironically the best price per GB, but ludicrously expensive.

We’ve been touting Newegg RAM bundles at Tom’s Hardware for months, and they remain a stalwart way to save at least something on RAM if you’re building a PC. Generally, you can expect to find a bundle that will get you the RAM for around $200 if you buy it alongside a motherboard and a CPU. Remember, the value in a RAM bundle is pairing RAM with other parts, the prices of which are not inflated in the current market. With CPU, motherboard, and cooling prices holding steady or falling, buying components together gives you a clear picture of the actual value proposition. The RAM in this Newegg bundle, for instance, costs $236, thanks to the price of the 9800X3D and the X870E.

The future of the RAM market

Sadly, if you’re in the market for RAM, even at these exorbitant prices, we’re still firmly in the bite-the-bullet phase. Manufacturers like SK hynix are working to add capacity to their roster, and the advent of China’s CXMT could provide some relief. But industry figures warn that 2027 could actually be even worse for memory shortages than 2026. By extension, that presumably means pricing will also get worse. In truth, the best solution right now is probably not to buy RAM, but if you’re in desperate need, you’re going to have to pay high prices in some way, shape, or form.

Waiting it out is always an option if you can do so, but Adata’s chairman recently said you might be waiting a decade or more. The latter prognostication sounds a little extreme, but one year into the RAMapocalypse, more than a few indications point to things getting worse rather than better.

Unless you already have a kit of DDR5, or deep pockets for PC hardware, you’re stuck right now. Despite seeing some of the best CPUs for gaming released just in the past year, the DDR5 tax represents a major hurdle to building or upgrading your PC. Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs hold an unintended solution, offering support for both DDR4 and DDR5. We wanted to see if this on-ramp to a next-gen platform was really as smooth as it looks at first glance.

The idea is simple. If you already have a DDR4 kit, you can upgrade to a relatively new CPU while keeping the door open for a transition to DDR5 without buying a new chip. It’s inexpensive, and a bit more of a practical solution than upgrading to DDR5 with a single DIMM and worrying about pairing it with another later.

Our testing shows how much of a performance difference there is with DDR4 in games. We’re focused on games here for a few reasons. First, in non-gaming applications, memory speed is highly dependent on the specific workload you’re running. Games, despite using different engines, are largely similar workloads that stress the hardware in similar ways. Further, those workloads are continually evolving as new games, new technologies, and new hardware targets are released.

We kept our testing focused on Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs because they’re the only options that give us a true apples-to-apples comparison between DDR4 and DDR5. We don’t have any AMD CPUs in our test pool because there aren’t any chips that support both DDR4 and DDR5. This isn’t intended to be a competitive analysis between AMD and Intel. That conversation opens up a much broader conversation about total platform cost.

Testing DDR4 vs. DDR5 on Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs

To test DDR4 and DDR5’s gaming performance, we ran Intel’s main LGA 1700 stack through a 15-game gauntlet of benchmarks. Notably, we don’t have results for the Core i9-12900K, as our sample has a janky memory controller that won’t boot on DDR5 systems. You can read a full breakdown of how (and why) we tested in the way we did in the section below.

We ran all of the games through our 16-game benchmark suite, though we cut Doom: The Dark Ages from the results here. An update for the game rolled out mid-way through testing and skewed our results, so we’re omitting it. The 15 remaining games still paint a clear picture of the performance difference between DDR4 and DDR5.

As usual, we tested with the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition at 1080p with a mixture of High and Ultra settings. We test at 1080p to maximize the differences between CPUs, and it remains the most widely-used resolution for gaming. Deltas between CPUs will decrease as the resolution climbs and the GPU becomes a larger influence in performance.

Below is our geomean from testing across the suite. Given that we’re looking to compare a single CPU’s performance with DDR4 and DDR5, we’ve highlighted some CPUs with the same color (13700K is always dark red, for instance, while 14700K is always dark blue).

The chart above is a bit difficult to parse, mainly because we’re often jumping several entries to get to a comparison point. For the stack of chips we tested, here’s a clearer overview of the performance difference with DDR4:

As we’ll get into with the individual game tests below, the drop in performance between DDR4 and DDR5 can be much larger than the comparison in our geomean (and, in turn, smaller in other games). What’s important for the overall performance drop is the trend as we move to newer chips. You can see a 9% drop grow to 14%, as DDR4 becomes a more significant bottleneck when the processor it’s feeding becomes more powerful.

That trend is one of the main driving forces behind our look at DDR4 and DDR5 gaming performance today. We looked at DDR4 and DDR5 performance extensively near the Alder Lake launch, and even more recently last year, evaluating performance across a wide range of applications. The testing here is focused solely on gaming to answer a critical question of building a PC today: Are you really giving up that much gaming performance with DDR4?

The answer is, yes, you’re giving up around 11% to 14% of your gaming performance overall when the memory is the only variable that changes. That’s a consistent drop, as well. Older titles care see less of a benefit from DDR5 generally, but we saw a steady decrease of around 11-14% across the games we tested, with some titles pushing above a 20% drop.

007 First Light is the newest game we tested, and it outpaces our averages. The 14900K sees a 16.5% drop with DDR4, while the 13600K drops 12.7% of its performance. Especially among the most powerful CPUs here, you can see DDR4 level off performance in a way that’s undesirable. The 14900K, for instance, is just 1.7% faster than the 13900K with DDR4, but it’s 4.6% faster with DDR5.

Similarly, in Crimson Desert, you can see the 13700K lose 13.7% of its performance with DDR4, and the 14600K drop 13.2% of its performance. It’s worth noting that neither of these games are particularly sensitive to memory speed. You can see in our recent Ryzen 7 5800X3D re-review that even a boost from 3D V-Cache doesn’t give CPUs with a robust memory chain an automatic advantage.

Perhaps the most consequential of the newer games we tested is Marvel Rivals, not only because it shows a much larger gap between DDR4 and DDR5, but also because it’s the most-played game in our test suite by a long shot (short of Counter-Strike 2). For weaker chips like the 12600K, the gap is 13.9%, just slightly above our geomean. For the more powerful 14700K, however, it shows a gap of 25.3%. Even the 14600K drops 17.4% of its performance with DDR4.

Counter-Strike 2 is less extreme, perhaps as a consequence of having such a high floor for average frame rates. You can see that the Alder Lake chips don’t care much about DDR4, with the Core i7-12700K performing identically across both memory standards. That gap grows with more powerful CPUs, however, with the 14700K creeping up toward a 10% delta.

In Spider-Man 2, we can see more consistent drops across the stack of chips we tested, with most CPUs dropping around 18% of their average performance with DDR4. That’s true even on the weaker 12700K, which lost 15% of its performance. The 14900K, meanwhile, was 18.7% slower with DDR4.

Even in an older, GPU-heavy title like Cyberpunk 2077, we can see a consistent drop. You can see in this game that we become completely bound by the GPU at the top of the rankings, but that’s a level these chips can’t hit when paired with DDR4. The 14700K drops about 14% of its performance, and the 13600K, about 13% of its performance.

You can browse through our remaining benchmarks using the gallery above, but most games tell a similar story. The gap between DDR4 and DDR5 persists, of course, but there’s another angle to look at the data. DDR4 flattens off performance, creating a bottleneck with faster CPUs. That could be justification for buying a weaker chip if you can only afford DDR4 memory right now.

Outside of performance, one important aspect of using a DDR4 system compared to DDR5 is power consumption. With DDR4, power consumption of the CPU increases, as you can see in the chart above. The jump is generally only a few watts, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. In games, we’re well below the operating temperature of all the chips in our test pool, but when pushing toward maximum power draw, DDR4 will post yet another limitation.

How (and why) we tested DDR4 vs. DDR5 now

DDR5 is way too expensive, and Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs represent a unique value proposition given the unprecedented increases in memory prices over the past several months. The idea is that you can upgrade to a newer platform while sticking with DDR4, giving you a stopgap for an eventual DDR5 upgrade. It seems Intel recognizes this value proposition, as well, as it’s reportedly slated to launch Raptor Lake Next CPUs on the LGA 1700 socket.

We tested the main stack of chips, short of the Core i9-12900K, as described above. We didn’t test variants like KS releases to keep our testing focused, as well as lower-end SKUs like the 12100F or 14400. The memory controllers in these lower-end chips are weaker, sustaining lower DDR5 speeds, so expect less of a difference in performance with them.

Below, you can see the test benches we used. In addition to keeping hardware consistent, we use a frozen OS image with an identical software stack. We’re running the same version of the same apps on the same OS update, with identical drivers.

In the BIOS, we enabled XMP for both kits of memory. We also tested with Resizeable BAR turned on, and Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) turned off. Most motherboard vendors off a profile with the power limits removed on Intel CPUs, which can push the processor outside of warrantied specifications. We stuck with the default “Performance” profile for our testing here.

Is DDR4 still worth it?

It makes sense that we’ve seen a shift back toward DDR4. Although DDR4 prices have risen in lockstep with DDR5 prices, they started from a much lower base. A kit of DDR4 today is not much more expensive than a DDR5 kit of similar capacity a year ago. And, with estimates that the memory shortage could persist through 2030, there’s a strong argument for going with a DDR4 system if you’re in need of an upgrade.

The performance trade-off alone isn’t as big of a problem as it appears at first glance. You’re going to lose about 15% of your average gaming performance with Intel’s LGA 1700 CPUs (particularly Raptor Lake chips). You’ll spend more than twice as much on a 32GB kit of DDR5-6000 as you will on a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200, as you can see in our RAM price tracker. And, you might already have a DDR4 kit, cutting that cost completely out of an upgrade. Dollars spent for performance gained, DDR4 makes complete sense.

However, performance isn’t the only factor at play, and that’s the unfortunate reality of using a DDR4 platform right now. It’s a dead end, both for performance and upgrade potential. As we saw in our recent testing of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, there’s a performance wall in games with DDR4, one which the 5800X3D often runs up against. The memory is a bottleneck, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a way around that problem without upgrading to DDR5.

We also aren’t seeing any new DDR4 CPUs, at least right now. AMD re-released the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and there are murmurs of Raptor Lake Next. But given the current landscape, we don’t expect a CPU that will radically change the performance you can get out of a DDR4 platform.

Instead of sticking with DDR4 for a better CPU, the best course of action right now is to bite the bullet on DDR5 and buy a weaker CPU, particularly if gaming performance is your main concern. Given that memory prices are out of control, there are excellent deals on DDR5 CPUs right now, allowing you to offset the cost of an upgrade and giving you a kit of DDR5 to carry forward in future builds.

As an example, AMD’s recently-released Ryzen 7 7700X3D is $80 cheaper than the re-released Ryzen 7 5800X3D, despite coming in nearly 20% faster in average gaming performance. The $230 Ryzen 5 7600X3D shows similar gains, and it’s even more affordable.

In Intel’s camp, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus represent some of the best all-around value in the CPU world right now, with compelling gaming performance and chart-topping application performance, all for around $300.

You will spend more on a cheaper CPU and a kit of DDR5. There’s no indication that the memory shortage is ending soon, however. We’ve actually seen prices continue to increase despite the surge leveling off. Opting for DDR5 today buys you better gaming performance, but more importantly, it gives you a kit of memory that you can continue to use as new CPUs and platforms are released.

One of the common misconceptions in today's memory market is that once memory modules based on chips from CXMT enter the consumer market, there will be cheaper alternatives to memory sticks running DRAM from the Big Three. While availability of CXMT-powered modules certainly impacts average selling prices, these products are not cheaper than those based on ICs from Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix even in China, as noticed by @harukaze5719.

A 64GB DDR5-5600 RDIMM based on memory from Samsung or SK hynix costs 18,595 CNY ($2,745) at JD.com, whereas a module featuring the same capacity and specification, but using DRAMs from CXMT is priced at 18,999 CNY ($2,805), according to observations by @harukaze5719. It is noteworthy that a Samsung 64GB DDR5-5600 RDIMM made by Samsung and sold by Samsung costs $2,425 at Amazon.com in the U.S.

While the $60 difference seems significant, it is really just 2.2%, which can be considered negligible at these sky-high prices. Nonetheless, many expect CXMT-based memory modules to be cheaper than those carrying chips from Micron, Samsung, or SK hynix, so observing that they are even a bit more expensive than offerings with ICs from renowned manufacturers may be a bit surprising.

Indeed, because CXMT produces memory chips using an outdated fabrication technology, its DRAM ICs consume more power than those made using the latest manufacturing processes, have lower performance potential, and mediocre overclockability. Furthermore, the Chinese government heavily subsidizes both ChangXin Memory Technologies and Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC), which enables both to sell their memory at lower prices although their actual costs may be higher compared to those of the Big Three.

As a result, it is reasonable to expect CXMT to charge less for its chips compared to chips from renowned producers. Truth to be told, we do not know CXMT's quotes, they may be as high as those from other manufacturers and the only reason why module producers buy them is that they are the only chips available. Furthermore, companies tend to price products based on what the market will bear, not strictly on production cost or their characteristics. In fact, as everyone is capacity constrained these days, there is little incentive for CXMT to price its DRAMs significantly below those from renowned makers. However, while CXMT may indeed charge less for chips (e.g., because the Chinese government issues an appropriate directive), this lowers costs for module makers, but has a limited effect on retail prices of actual DIMMs or RDIMMs.

Whether potential savings reach end customers depends on market competition, supply-demand conditions, and the pricing strategies of module makers, distributors, and retailers. Furthermore, when prominent companies like Apple, Dell, or Corsair use a memory chip SKU, this one must pass rigorous validation processes and is usually tested in-house, or by contract manufacturers, which adds to costs and somewhat erases the price difference between suppliers.

As a result, CXMT memory chips may make the lives of hardware makers easier, but are not expected to impact the retail prices you pay.

Microsoft announced that it’s increasing Minecraft’s minimum and recommended system requirements for the first time in 17 years. According to the company’s blog post, Minecraft: Java Edition will get a spec bump to ensure that the game runs smoothly today and in the future. While it’s understandable that the game’s developers would want to increase the performance of the hardware that the title runs on to implement more advanced features, the new requirements are significantly higher than the previous minimum specification. This could negatively affect players on older hardware that barely hits the minimum requirements, who would have no choice but to upgrade their PCs at a time when RAM prices are at a record high.

The new minimum specifications are quite reasonable, with the recommended specs falling squarely within the performance of the most common hardware in June’s Steam Hardware Survey (which also indicates that AMD now has more than 45% market share compared to Intel). If your system used to be at or higher than Minecraft: Java Edition’s previously recommended specifications, but no longer hits the current minimum requirements, you can switch over to the Bedrock Edition to continue gaming, although you might have to forgo some of your favorite mods.

If you’re running the bare minimum hardware to play Minecraft, Microsoft said that you could still possibly launch the game, although it warned that you might run into some issues. “These updated recommended system requirements won’t stop you from playing Minecraft: Java Edition today. If your computer falls below the new minimum requirements, Java Edition should still launch,” the company said in the Minecraft blog. “However, its performance and visual quality are no longer guaranteed on below-spec hardware, and it may struggle or fail to launch Java Edition in the future – especially as we transition away from OpenGL and towards Vulkan. We will keep players informed of these changes, especially changes that will sunset hardware that previously supported Minecraft: Java Edition.”

This means that you’ll have to spend some money to upgrade your system to just to continue playing your favorite game. You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get a new PC or join a giveaway to be able to play, though. If you know what you’re looking for, you can plausibly buy a used gaming laptop or desktop PC for around $350 to $500 — that should give you about a decade or more to enjoy the game if Microsoft keeps its spec upgrade cadence of 17 years for future versions of Minecraft.

u/DaKrazyKid went on Reddit to exhibit their mini-ITX gaming PC build dubbed "RAM Machine," which features 36 RAM sticks. The OP said the Steam Machine, with its paltry 16GB of RAM, inspired the build, which has 16 RGB RAM sticks controlled through SignalRGB to give you all that RGB goodness, and they’re giving it away to one lucky commenter in the r/PcBuild subreddit. It’s unclear if the Redditor is affiliated with SignalRGB, although the giveaway seems to be sponsored by the company because of the disclaimer that excludes employees, affiliates, and subsidiaries of SignalRGB, their immediate family members, and persons living in the same household from the sweepstakes.

Although the PC itself isn’t a top-of-the-line unit, it’s a decent build that offers better specifications than the Steam Machine. The RAM Machine comes with an Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU, a single-fan RTX 5060 GPU, 32GB of Patriot DDR5-8200 RAM, and a 2TB Patriot SSD, all attached to a B860-I motherboard and powered by a 750-watt PSU. While this might not give you native 4K gaming, this is more than enough for 1080p gaming and could even handle some 1440p titles. We checked the cost of this mini-PC on PCPartPicker, and a similarly specced unit costs more than $1,500. This makes it 50% more expensive than the Steam Machine and quite a valuable giveaway.

This isn’t the first time that SignalRGB has sponsored a giveaway of a wild-looking PC if the company indeed sponsored this. Just last year, it turned a microwave into an all-in-one PC and gave it away to one lucky winner. It also had another raffle in 2023, this time a powerful gaming PC built inside a Starfield control panel case. The biggest thing these three PCs have in common, of course, is that they use SignalRGB to control the RGB lights in these systems. Although this is a free app you can use to control the RGB lights on your computer, no matter what brand they’re from, it also offers a Pro subscription which costs $5.99 a month or $45 a year. This tier gives you more advanced features like cooling control, system monitoring, macros, and more.

If you want to join the giveaway, all you need to do is head to the Reddit post and leave a comment. Don’t get your hopes up, though, as it already has more than 78,000 comments at the time of writing.

A man by the name of Li and his partner by the name of Cheng have been arrested for a string of RAM stick thefts from various hotels in China where gaming PCs are standard room equipment. This was a pretty small-time operation, with a total of ~ 13,200 yuan (about $1,950) raised by selling 16 stolen RAM sticks on the second-hand goods market. However, the source describes the accused thieves as purveyors of "frenzied hotel room-dismantling" (machine translation).

According to the report, Li began his tech treasure crime spree in May, in Shihezi City, Northern Xinjiang. After checking into an eSports hotel, the light-fingered Li couldn’t resist plucking a pair of RAM sticks from the in-room computer. The solo RAM thief’s initial success spurred him to recruit a partner, and in the second two weeks of May, the dynamic RAM duo of Li and Cheng swept through multiple hotels in the aforementioned “frenzied” fashion.

The crime spree might be one of the first of its kind we’ve read about, but it wouldn’t make the thieves filthy rich. The source notes that 16 RAM sticks in total were taken from eSports hotels during the two-week criminal spree. They would sell the slyly stolen sticks of silicon for a total of ~ 13,200 yuan (about $1,950) in profit via a mix of online marketplaces and brick-and-mortar stores.

In the Chinese language report, it is noted that subsequent guests at the eSport hotels complained about systems with black screens, unable to boot. Customer complaints led to investigations by hotel staff, and the police were called out once the DRAM dirty deeds were definitive. Perhaps the duo would have been more successful if they had decided to just halve the RAM in the raided PCs. Guests who followed them would be less likely to loudly complain about RAM-deficient PCs than completely dead ones.

The Chinese media report ends by saying Li and Cheng are both in custody, with further investigations into the pair’s RAM piracy ongoing.