Memory: DDR4 RAM becomes more expensive

Some memory modules have become considerably pricier over the past few days. Certain DDR4 DIMMs for desktop PCs, notebooks, and servers are particularly affected. It is currently difficult to assess whether this is a short-term increase or a longer-lasting trend.

The background to this is probably that the few remaining manufacturers of the actual SDRAM semiconductor chips are switching their production facilities to other chip types. This is basically obvious because new desktop PCs, notebooks, and servers have been designed for DDR5 SDRAM for several years.

Modern RAM, more profitable

Despite this, DDR4 SDRAM chips and the modules fitted with them (DIMMs/UDIMMs, SO-DIMMs, RDIMMs) remained significantly cheaper than those with DDR5 for many years. Apparently, however, Samsung, SK-Hynix and Micron now see better profit opportunities with DDR5, LPDDR5, LPDDR5X, GDDR7 and High Bandwidth Memory (HBM).

The Taiwanese industry service DRAMeXchange.com reports significantly rising prices for certain DDR4 module types on the spot market. Some are now pricier than alternatives with DDR5 SDRAM chips of the same capacity. Some buyers probably also feared rising tariffs and therefore bought in stock.

Spot checks at the online price comparator geizhals.de – a heise offer – do not reveal a consistent picture, at least for German online retailers. So far, only the prices of a few selected DDR4 memory modules have risen there. However, it appears that modules with a higher capacity and the DDR4-3200 speed class are more likely to be affected than slower modules that hold less data.

(ciw)