What has happened to desktop memory prices?

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Holy schniky's, I haven't bought desktop memory in awhile, think DDR2, so imagine my surprise when I found the 'egg selling 2 x 4GB sticks of Corsair XMS3 DDR3 for $38. That got me thinking about upgrading an older DDR2 board I have from 4GB to 8GB. Well, 4GB sticks of DDR2 are $60 apiece. Since this board is just used in a home office box, I decided to upgrade both the board and memory for under $95 rather than spending $120 for just a memory upgrade. I'll just use the same proc, HD, and vid card, and reload the OS. Gawd, this stuff is cheap, or has it always been this low?
 
DDR3 has come WAY down recently. I just bought 2x4GB sticks of Corsair two months ago for $32 after sale and rebate only for the regular price to fall that far soon afterward. I also got 2x4GB DDR3 Corsair SODIMMs for my work laptop just to max it out for around the same price. Crazy.

DDR3 is the new standard so the older stuff is going to be a bit higher even though it's 'older' tech. About 2.5 years ago, I bought 2x2GB DDR2 for the wife's then-new computer for about $45 which was a steal at the time. Less than a year later, the same exact item at Newegg had jumped to almost $90. The reason? Windows 7 was released so there was a big demand for RAM. Now the prices have settled back down to about $45 so I finally got that second set of 2x2GB for her.

Unbelievable that RAM has fallen to around or under $5/1GB. I remember when a 4MB SIMM upgrade for our old 486 was almost $150!
 
Yeah memory prices are rock bottom. I thought 8GB on boxing day was good for $80, but it turns out, I've seen it for even less recently.
There are some interesting articles on it. The memory market is being flooded because its so costly to start and stop producing memory, they just keep making it.
 
Agreed, it's ultra-cheap now. We ordered an 8GB DDR3 DIMM kit for a laptop here and it was like $47.
 
New FAB upgrade come online, and the supply suddenly increased significantly, that's what happened.

It is not because it is expensive to start and stop memory production, it is because most of the costs are fixed (design, equipment upgrade, loan interest) that you have to run it 247 and sell at whatever you can get for all of the chips. Wafers are cheap and cutting production wouldn't lower cost at all unless everyone else in the market cut production (market making, which is illegal) too.
 
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