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  • lagittaja - Friday, December 18, 2015 - link

    "Today we're launching a new feature on the AnandTech Pipeline: Price Check."
    I like it.

    I've also been watching the DRAM prices, waiting for the prices to get low once again. Been holding off on buying more DRAM..
    Oh the 2011-2012 prices, I remember them fondly. We're close but not quite there yet.
  • CaedenV - Friday, December 18, 2015 - link

    Ya, that is when I built my current PC. Picked up 16GB of DDR3 1600 on sale for $75 at the time! A year later those same chips had almost doubled in price. Now they are just starting to get back down, and over the summer I found a deal for 16GB of 1333 for my home server for $80... not quite as good of a deal, but it was needed, so I was going to buy it... and it was a lot cheaper than it has been for a while.

    Very interested to see how DDR4 does as time moves forward. Honestly, I only have 8GB of ram in my PC; I ended up giving the other 8 to my wife's PC when we did her upgrade. And even then with games I am using a max of ~6-6.5GB of it.
    Point is, DDR4 allows for lower power usage, which I don't need. It allows for more ram in a system, which I don't need. From benchmarks there does not seem to be much, if any, real world performance benefit compared to DDR3... so what exactly is the point of it in a desktop PC situation? I get that these things help with high density servers, and low power devices, but somehow I thought we would get a benefit on the mainstream desktop PC side too.
  • bill.rookard - Friday, December 18, 2015 - link

    Well, in the very high end systems, there would be benefits in capacity and speed, but you're correct in that average user (moderate gamer, basic desktop systems) wouldn't notice much of a difference. To that end, high end DDR3 is in the same league as your low end DDR4. The only thing that's going to push DDR4 usage is the continuing rollout of Skylake and then Kaby Lake platforms (and to a lesser degree AMDs upcoming Zen).

    Eventually though DDR3 will fade off into the sunset.
  • takeship - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link

    Second this. I'm not personally interested in any DDR4 speeds below 3000mhz, as you can get DDR3 kits with very nearly the same performance in that domain. I.e. my own home machine with a 16gb (8x2) 2133 CL11 kit is not significantly out performed by any of the JDEC standard DDR4 kits. I'm really hoping that we start to see 3600+mhz kits as closer to standard over the next year. Otherwise I have the sneaking suspicion that DDR4 on the desktop is more about obsolescing DDR3 than it is about delivering a performance increase.
  • Impulses - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    I bought 16GB of Patriot 1600 DDR3 (albeit in a 4x4GB kit) for $65 when it was really low, didn't even think I'd really get much use out of it but I was running 1333 so I figured why not.

    The $235 I paid for 32GB of 2666 Corsair LPX earlier this year stung a bit, but I've paid far far more for RAM in the past (even relatively speaking if you go by what was the 'sweet spot' at the time rather than raw price per gig).

    I bought that stuff during Skylake's launch, it's fallen a bit but not *that* much. Same kit is now $210, didn't really look to see if others undercut it too much, don't wanna know!
  • HollyDOL - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    I remember my first PC RAM was 4MB SIMM at about 630USD. Compared to that even the most expensive modules today are virtually free :-)
    Not that I would complain if they were even cheaper, given my current computer mobo seems to start having some issues and I'll have to invest in new machine when it gives up completely.
  • Murloc - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    DDR3 will simply disappear because new systems will only support DDR4.

    There doesn't have to be a point for the customer.

    It's a fact that for gamers you just need enough memory and then everything performance-related is quite irrelevant and focusing the money on the GPU or peripherals gets you more utility per dollar.
  • boeush - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    DDR4 will eventually leave DDR3 far behind in performance, as it is slated to scale to much higher operating frequencies. Basically, DDR4 starts out at performance parity with evolved (faster frequency, lower CL) DDR3 - but in the next couple of years you'll see DDR4 4000+, as compared to the current crop of predominantly 2133 in commodity lines.
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link

    "The chart above shows the absolute latency of SDRAM through DDR4. If you start at the left and work your way across the chart, you’ll see what happened — PC133 might have matched DDR when the latter ran at 266MHz (effective), but DDR eventually scaled to 400MHz and hit latencies lower than anything SDRAM could offer. Similarly, DDR2’s 1066MHz’s absolute latency was better than DDR-400. It took DDR3-2133 to simply equal DDR2-1066, and PCWatch estimated we’d need DDR4-4266 to match the latency of DDR3-2133. This chart is a bit old now, so I’m not claiming it’s 100% accurate, but the general relationship it depicts is still true. DDR4 is far more scalable than DDR3, but it’s still fighting back from behind the latency eight ball. Even if it wasn’t, the advent of large caches, speculative prefetching, and on-die memory controllers have all reduced the impact of faster DRAM in most cases." — Joel Hruska
  • Oxford Guy - Sunday, December 20, 2015 - link

    "Don’t expect DDR4, even at high bandwidth, to drive enormous performance improvements over the long term.

    Since DDR4-3200 won't be a mainstream standard until 2016 at the earliest, the implication is that you'll need DDR4-4266 to even see an improvement -- and since DDR4-4266 may not come to desktops at all if HBM or HMC are ready first, it further implies that buying into high-end RAM is merely purchasing expensive snake oil unless you're absolutely certain you use applications that rely on it.

    Integrated graphics wil be the big winners from a boost to DDR4-3200. At that data transfer rate, the on-die GPU would have bandwidth equivalent to low-end GDDR5 today." — Hruska
  • boeush - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link

    See http://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-...

    DDR4 2400 at CAS 15 was judged roughly equivalent in performance to DDR3 2133 at CAS 11. While the higher-end DDR3 has better latency than the low-end DDR4, it can't compete on bandwidth. And very soon DDR4 3200 will be the new norm, with enthusiast kits pushing 4000+...
  • boeush - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link

    Here's a recent (Dec 1) review of Skylake (i7 6700k) performance on DDR3 vs DDR4:

    http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...

    Basically, they find that even current batches of DDR4 are highly competitive - and superior more often than not - vs the high-end DDR3 parts, both on synthetic and real-life benchmarks.
  • yuhong - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    At least we are using 4Gbit DDR3 this time instead of 2Gbit, which is good both for us and DRAM makers.
  • iamkyle - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    "Today we're launching a new feature on the AnandTech Pipeline: PCPartPicker...I mean Price Check."
  • hyno111 - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Maybe they should also check DDR4 SODIMM prices as market demand is slightly increasing.
  • bug77 - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Being cheaper is always good from a customer's perspective. But what I don't like is that for several years now we've been limited at 8GB per stick. There are 16GB sticks, but they always run higher latencies and/or higher voltages.
    It's not a problem, because 2x8GB is plenty for almost everyone, but it seems there's an invisible wall somewhere.
  • frenchy_2001 - Tuesday, December 22, 2015 - link

    You just stated it yourself: need. As there is no real need for higher density than 2x8GB, the demand for it is low, supply stays low and the price is higher.
    Hardware has left software in the dust for years now. Very few applications can even use that amount of memory and what most people use their computer for (email/web browsing/office work/video) has been possible at about the same performance (or indistinguishable) for years.
  • yuhong - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

    More precisely, 4Gbit and 8Gbit DDR4.
  • yuhong - Wednesday, December 30, 2015 - link

    And yes, obviously the die size for 8Gbit DDR4 is larger so they run at slower timings. You will see faster timings as the die size gets smaller as a result of process shrinks.
  • aggrokalle - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Anton Shilov now also working for anandtech? How comes? TBH i miss my good'ol daily xbitlabs.com
  • Murloc - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    yeah price checks like these are definitely going to be useful content.
  • sonicmerlin - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Next can you do a feature on HDD prices, and how they're essentially the same $/GB as they were in 2011?
  • azazel1024 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link

    If you mean the highest capacities, that might be more or less true in $/GB. However, back roughly in 2011 I had gotten some Samsung 2TB drives for about $100 a pop (2 of them over the course of about 10 months, starting in I think 2010 and the last one was a 2011 purchase). IIRC I got one for $100 and the other one was $90. A bit less than a year ago I snapped up 4, 3TB drives for $90 for the most expensive one, 2 for $65 and 1 for $60. Yes, all of them where on sale or Amazon warehouse deals...but both of those Samsung 2TB drives were also on sale at the time. Sure, the $/GB isn't many times over lower after 4-5 years, but it still was roughly half the price per GB.

    SSDs, now those are tumbling like crazy. Might actually surpass HDDs in another 4-6 years. Won't be sad if that happens.
  • jasonelmore - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    I think a lot of this "Supply Exceeding Demand" has to do with Intel's 6700K CPU just not being available.

    It has been 4 months since release, and you still cant buy one at MSRP. Intel is devoting 90% of their 14nm Fab's to Dual Core Mobile chips. Big mistake

    They already admitted they made a mistake by ignoring the Broadwell Desktop Market, and also admitted to losing several million dollars because of that decision.

    But they did not learn, because they make the same mistake again with Skylake and devoted almost their entire 14nm fab capacity to mobile chips, instead of desktop chips.

    VR, 4K, and the PC Masterrace Uprising has drove Desktop PC components to new highs, but nobody can get the K varient Parts they want.

    Intel, Listen man, Learn from your mistake... you gotta treat the desktop space with more respect. Don't listen to market analyst, the PC Desktop market is trying to explode, but your not letting it.
  • Michael Bay - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Intel doesn`t care about a few measly millions, and neither does it care about basement overclockers that don`t make one percent of the market all put in one basement.
    Money is in mobile right now, and that`s where Intel will go.
  • patrickjp93 - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Most of its 14nm capacity is actual Broadwell E, EP, and Knight's Landing right now, and those are all much higher-margin products than the 6700K, which actually I bought for $320 in late October, just above MSRP, right where they always end up.
  • BMNify - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    Price Check is a Nice feature, hope you will cover loads of computer parts and even accessories like Wifi routers etc in this.
  • svan1971 - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    I'll wait for 3000 cas 9
  • patrickjp93 - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    It will never happen, and nor should it matter since the bus latency went down by more than 10 nanoseconds vs. the 2 added by higher CAS in DDR4.
  • Galcobar - Saturday, December 19, 2015 - link

    When dealing with a commodity largely produced in Asia, information on the effect of the much stronger US dollar would be helpful.
  • Shadow7037932 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link

    Nice. Dropping faster than expected. I'm waiting for the new GPUs (Pascal/Arctic Islands) to drop before upgrading my venerable i7 920.
  • creed3020 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link

    It would be great to an article like this for Hard Disk Drives. The "great floods" of 2012 which affected Seagate and WDC allowed for a pricing surge that has yet to fully recover.

    Will we ever see 2TB desktop drives for $70 or 3TB drives for $99 again? That was the benchmark...
  • azazel1024 - Monday, December 21, 2015 - link

    Hmmm, I see Seagate 3TB drives, not on sale, for $86 right now...

    Which of course is a paltry decrease over 3 years, but they are still lower than they were then, if not by a lot.

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