tal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJwh3erQlyE&list=RDSJwh3erQlyE&start_radio=1

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.

GPU prices

Outside of maybe integrated GPUs, I doubt it, because they need their own memory and are constrained by the same bottleneck

DRAM.

Or at least CPU prices?

I've read one article arguing that CPU prices will likely drop during the RAM shortage.

I don't know if that's actually true

I think that depends very much on the ability of CPU manufacturers to economically scale down their production to match demand, and I don't know to what degree that is possible. If they need to commit to a given amount of production in advance, then yeah, probably.

Go back a couple years, and DRAM manufacturers

who are currently making a ton of money due to the massive surge in demand from AI

were losing a ton of money, because they couldn't inexpensively rapidly scale production up and down to match demand. I don't know what the economics are like for CPUs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fear-dram-glut-stifling-micron-155958125.html

November 5, 2018

To be clear, the oversupply concerns that have plagued Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares for weeks now are completely valid. Micron stock has fallen as much as 40% just since June on this deteriorating dynamic.

In short, the world doesn’t need as many memory chips as Micron and rivals like Samsung (OTCMKTS:SSNLF) and SK Hynix are collectively making. The glut is forcing the price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) modules so low that it’s increasingly tougher to make a buck in the business.

We had a glut of DRAM as late as early this year:

https://evertiq.com/news/56996

Weak Demand and Inventory Backlogs

Both the DRAM and the NAND markets are still in a state of oversupply, with excess inventory leading to significant price declines through Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This is driven by multiple factors such as weak consumer demand.

Memory manufacturers ramped up production during previous periods of strong demand, but the market failed to meet these forecasts. This has resulted in inventory backlogs that now weigh on prices.

That's fair, but my understanding is that VRChat, despite the name, isn't a VR-only thing.

Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they've already done the technical work).

I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's vaguely like Second Life, popular with folks creating adult-content-oriented-worlds.

From a technical standpoint, that might actually be a pretty good example of a game that would benefit from cloud gaming, since I assume that it's not all that latency-critical, not the way an FPS would be.

I guess that there would potentially be privacy issues with adult content stuff that would argue against cloud hosting, but in the case of VRChat, the service itself is already living in the cloud, so...shrugs

If it's a leak in a mod and some pages just aren't being accessed at all, then I'd think that the OS might be able to just page them out.

It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don't need all that much space to just store swap, and it's vastly cheaper than DRAM.

If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.

If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW

And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:

https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal/dp/B0FY4CQRYF

I have no idea the degree to which "lots of cheap, fast swap" helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it'll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.

If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it'll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don't expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn't need to last forever.

Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.

I assume this:

https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-offers-free-windows-10-extended-security-update-options-as-eos-nears/

The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.

Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.

If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11. 

Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store. 

“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.

So you can get one extra year, but you need to tie the PC's Administrator account to a Microsoft account, and either need to pay a $30 subscription fee, spend their Microsoft Rewards points, or set the PC to sync to their cloud service.

What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it?

I'm sure that you could do that, but I think part of the problem there is that everyone else is going to be in the same boat, short of RAM, and I'm not sure what demand there is for a gaming PC stripped of its RAM.

If there isn't much demand, you might have trouble recouping what you spent on the parts you don't want.

I read one article that CPU prices may drop, because the increased RAM prices will drive up PC prices, price some people out of the market, and so there will be less demand for CPUs.

I thought the later, the better

Well, usually that is true.

Not a hardware fix, but there's memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:

https://www.xda-developers.com/little-known-windows-feature-hurting-your-pcs-performance-heres-how-can-disable-it/

Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I've mentioned here recently. I don't know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.

As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.

I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they've been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn't even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.

12th-gen CPUs are safe.

Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.

I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).

EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.

EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD's AM5-socket processors, they can't use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.