Now a particularly good time to buy registered memory?

[tanders12]

Sorry if this is the wrong subforum; didn't see one for memory.

While researching for my E5 2670 workstation build, I've seen it mentioned at least once that registered RAM is relatively cheap right now. Looking on ebay, it does appear that 4GB modules (usually not registered from what I can see) are indeed more expensive than 8GB modules, which is typically not the case from my experience.

There's a chance that I might someday want to throw a ton of memory in my workstation, for biological data processing purposes. I'm trying to keep the cost of the initial build to a minimum, and upgrade over time. But is RAM cheap enough now that it would be worth the investment to get as much as I can? ie do you expect the price of DDR3 REG ECC modules to go up as time goes on?

 

[sachem87184]

The big price jump on memory is going from 8GB to 16GB DIMMs. If you shop around you can find 8GB 1600MHZ DIMMs for around $15 a piece. That's my golden spot for buying as the 16GB DIMMs go for around 2.5x-4x more than a 8GB DIMM.

 

[pricklypunter]

The primary reason that DDR3 Reg Dimms are low in price just now, is that the market is saturated with it. This is a supply / demand issue. Once that supply begins to slow down, the price will rise accordingly. DDR4 will also begin making an impact as more folks move to later generation platforms, which will, in the short term, help stabilise the price, but as DDR3 becomes more scarce, the RAM will inevitably see price rises again. There is no future proofing here. If you buy DDR3 now to solve your immediate needs, you will at some point, have to move to a later generation platform anyway

If you have the money just now, buying what RAM you need to support your platform of choice is not the worst thing you could do

 

[tanders12]

I'm hoping to get 4-5 years out of this system. Given the diminishing returns (in terms of raw performance, not necessarily power efficiency) of Haswell and Skylake, I think that's reasonable, particularly with as many cores as the system has.

 

[pricklypunter]

The 2-3 year mark will be where things begin to look like they are dated I reckon, by year 4 you will definitely be itching to upgrade and move forward

 

[Fritz]

Buy now or be forever priced out of the market.