this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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RAM and SSD prices are still climbing—here’s our best advice for PC builders (arstechnica.com)
submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.

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[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I want:

  • Multitasking speed
  • Fast SSD storage for dev tasks, builds...etc
  • Large SSD storage for games
  • Memory to run multiple development environments, lots of research tabs, and not have to turn them off to go play a game for a couple hours
  • A GPU capable of playing most games on decent settings on a 4k monitor (upscaling allowed)

So generally this means:

  • mid-high end CPU
  • mid GPU
  • 64+ GB RAM
  • 1x High Performance 1TB m.2 SSD as primary drive
  • 1x w/e 2TB m.2 SSD for secondary

RAM prices makes this.... Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it's about 5 years old now, and it's time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM....

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn't actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.

My guess is that this generally isn't the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what's eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I'd expect it to be pretty effective.

dev tasks, builds…etc

I don't know how applicable it is to your use case, but there's ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.

It looks like Mozilla's sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven't used it myself.

[–] vividspecter@aussie.zone 2 points 2 hours ago

Or use zram/zswap on Linux with ZSTD compression, which dedicates part of physical RAM to compressed swap.