Good News! – RAM Prices May Finally Be Coming Down!

RAM Prices

It’s been a pretty rotten year for PC owners if you have been in the market for components or getting yourself a new PC.

RAM prices especially have been one of the most significant items which have received price increases in the last 18 months. In that short period of time, we have seen prices double for memory and in some instances nearly treble. These increases have led to many of us to have to make compromises in our builds.

Personally, it’s exactly for this reason that my PC has 16gb of RAM instead of 32gb.

The most significant reason behind the increase in RAM prices has been due to the boom in smartphones. Another factor in component prices rising, in general, has been the massive expansion seen in crypto-currency mining.

In a report by PC Gamer, however, RAM prices might finally be set to drop. A predicted downturn in crypto-currency mining did recently create a significant drop in the AMD share price and it appears that it may also affect component prices as a whole.

A drop in demand

Research by Reuters found that demand for memory chips dropped by about 5% in the last quarter of 2017. This, I must admit, was a little surprising as it was the period in which prices hit their (current) peak.

The report, however, went on to predict that demand would drop even further in 2018. Perhaps by as much as 30%. When supply is high and demand is low, that generally means only one thing in retail, prices will come down.

What we shouldn’t expect, however, is a price crash. This is going to be slow and steady. As always is the case, the speed of drop will not correlate to how quickly the prices were increased.

If you are, however, considering a RAM purchase or a system upgrade, you might want to wait a few months. By the Summer, while it might not be massively less expensive, you might see a notable difference.