PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to $600 due to shortage

Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by Aurornis on Monday November 24, 2025 @04:37PM (#46039669)

It's a valid question if you're not familiar with the RAM market. Sorry you're getting downvoted for it.

The manufacturers make the individual chips, not the modules (DIMMs). (EDIT: Some companies that make chips may also have business units that sell DIMMS, to be pedantic.)

The R in RDIMM means register, aka buffer. It's a separate chip that buffers the signals between the memory chips and the controller.

Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with extra chips added for the ECC capacity.

It can be confusing. The key thing to remember is that the price is driven by the price of the chips. The companies that make DIMMs are buying chips in bulk and integrating them on to PCBs.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by consp on Monday November 24, 2025 @05:11PM (#46039996)

> Even ECC modules use regular memory chips, but with extra chips added for the ECC capacity.

Quite a few unbuffered designs in the past had a "missing chip". If you ever wondered why a chip was missing on your stick, it's missing ECC. Don't know if it's still the case with DDR5 though.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by buildbot on Monday November 24, 2025 @05:21PM (#46040098)

I have not seen that yet DDR5, I think the signal integrity requirements are too high now to even have unused pads open. Most sticks don’t appear to have many traces at all on the top/bottom sides, just big power/ground planes.

Also with DDR5 each stick is actually 2 channels so you get 2 extra dies.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by bbarnett on Monday November 24, 2025 @07:41PM (#46041106)

There's some new half assed ECC type of RAM, not sure the name.

Was reading a series of displeased posts about it. Can't seem to find it now.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by lmz on Monday November 24, 2025 @08:46PM (#46041492)

On die ECC for DDR5. Which corrects locally but does not signal the host or deal with data between the die and the CPU.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by bbarnett on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @06:17AM (#46044745)

Thanks, drove me bananas trying to find that again.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by herewulf on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @08:57AM (#46057440)

Presumably this is being marketed indistinguishably from regular ECC RAM?

If so, that's terrible news. It was already difficult enough to find ECC RAM for "workstation" class machines (i.e.: High end, non-server CPUs that support ECC such as AMD Threadripper).

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by buildbot on Sunday November 30, 2025 @01:04PM (#46098906)

It's not - ECC RAM still means real, between the RAM and CPU ECC. It's literally an extra 8 bits per channels, for an extra 16 bits per dim. 40 bits vs 32.

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Re:PS5 now costs less than 64GB of DDR5 memory. RAM jumps to... by throwaway48476 on Monday November 24, 2025 @09:23PM (#46041733)

There's 9 bits in an ECC byte.

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