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Revealed!! Where Have All The Memory Deals Gone?

By on May 1, 2013

PNY-XLR8-Memory

Over the past few months, you may have noticed that there are very few memory deals (desktop and notebook) appearing on Ben’s Bargains. Did we forget? Did we start adhering to the (Apple) philosophy that you suffer with the memory you’re dealt with?

Well, no. Unfortunately, memory prices have gone up at least 10%  since the end of last year, which was a pretty good year for cheap memory, as was 2011. Back in 2009 and 2010, we had a long drought where memory deals were few and far between. I’m hoping that’s not the case this time, but we may be in for rising prices for the near future as the market stabilizes after a couple years of dropping prices.

gandalf-memory

Unlike the Great Hard Drive Flood in 2011 that disrupted worldwide HDD supply and sent prices skyrocketing, the rise in PC memory prices has been far less dramatic. Tablets (namely iPads) are winning the war with PCs, and the number of memory makers has decreased in the past year.

Consequently, the supply of PC DRAM has dwindled, contributing to the rising prices. Just a few months ago, you could find a 4GB module deal for under $16 and 16GB deals between $60 and $70.

In the past week, we’ve seen prices on memory deals that are considerably higher than deals we posted back in December. For example, the G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Memory is currently $93 shipped after code. Back in December, the exact memory was $60 shipped, which we didn’t even consider all that unusual. That’s a 55% jump in four months.

At $93, that’s not a bad price relative to the current prices out there. At Ben’s Bargains, we’ve been avoiding posting these kinds of sales, because we typically prefer to spotlight price drops or static sale prices. When hard drive prices went up at the end of 2011, we eventually posted sales that represented the best relative prices, even though they were considerably higher than deals we had posted earlier that year.

Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more memory deals, but keep in mind that higher prices are here to stay…at least for now.

About Joe Warner

I'm the senior editor of The CheckOut. I am an aficionado of shiny gadgets and classic Hollywood movies and can also tell you the names of the late '80s Swedish Davis Cup team members.

4 Comments

  1. zzyzx

    May 6, 2013 at 12:34 pm

    If you just ask Bacon Dave, he’ll tell you when memory prices will come down. He knows a lot of neat stuff…

    Reply

    • Joe Warner

      May 6, 2013 at 3:51 pm

      He definitely does!

      Reply

  2. Long John Silver

    May 3, 2013 at 3:37 pm

    Yes, occasional memory deals would be nice because people still need to buy memory.

    Reply

    • Joe Warner

      May 6, 2013 at 8:48 am

      All right, thanks for the feedback, LJS.

      Reply

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