DRAM Pricing Still Hasn't Bottomed Out

Posted 10/15/2010 at 7:14am | by Paul Lilly

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We took a peek at Newegg and found that the lowest priced 6GB kit of RAM is less than a hundred bucks (barely), and that includes shipping. That's pretty incredibly, and perhaps even a little sickening for anyone who may have forked over several hundred dollars for a high-end 2GB kit of standard DDR back in the day. Thankfully, memory prices have fallen steeply since then, particularly in the last couple of years when the market seemingly bottomed out. Well guess what? Lower prices are yet to come.

According to market research firm inSpectrum, prices of mainstream DRAM chips posted a big sequential drop in the contract market for the first half of October. This, inSpectrum says, is indicative of slow demand among all the major OEMs, noting that a true price bottom has yet to come.

Mainstream 2GB DDR3 modules averaged $30.70 (contract price) in the first half of October, a 10 percent sequential drop. Meanwhile, 2GB DDR2 modules dropped 5 percent to settle in at $32.

That's bad news for memory makers who have seen prices drop for the past several months. In the second half of July, for example, 2GB DDR3 modules were going for $43.1 (contract price). At some point, pricing will level out and perhaps even begin to rise again, but for now anyway, it appears you're safe to put off that memory upgrade.