If it was becoming too easy for you to navigate the ongoing DRAM shortage, there’s another entry on the leaderboards for the most expensive memory you can buy. Nemix, an American company, has just listed a whopping 2 TB of DDR5 ECC RAM on Amazon for $38,999, while you can also find the same sticks in a 4 TB configuration for $76,999.99 on Nemix’s website.
Spec-wise, you’re looking at four kits of 2 x 256 GB sticks for two terabytes — 512 GB per box, eight sticks total — and eight kits of 2 x 256 GB sticks for four terabytes, running at 6400 MT/s with a CAS latency of 52 across both configs.
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You don’t need us to tell you that’s car money for server RAM. You can get a Ford Mustang in lieu of that 2 TB setup, or a Tesla Model S instead of the 4 TB option. Even before the current component crisis, server memory has always been more expensive than standard desktop memory because it’s registered and error-correcting (ECC), which makes it RDIMM rather than UDIMM.
See, in normal DDR5 RAM that we use in our gaming computers, bit flips occur rarely, but they’re mostly harmless beyond a crash. Servers can’t afford that; they need the utmost stability, so they choose ECC memory that can actively correct single-bit errors on the fly. The sticks also have an extra buffer chip sitting between the memory and the CPU which helps reduce the load on the latter, and allow for higher capacities.
Therefore, server memory is fundamentally still DDR5, still using the same modules, but it’s different enough to warrant the added cost. You’ve been able to purchase high-capacity DDR4 server RAM for some time. We found Nemix’s own 2 TB kit for $13,468.89 on Amazon, which was only hiked by around $6,000 in the past few months. Relatively generous, if you consider the rest of the market.
The DDR5 RAM we’re highlighting is new, though, as it landed on Amazon just 29 days ago, when it was $32,997 at the start, then $34,012, and finally $38,999 today, when it was spotted by @FanlessTech. Over the past month, even this kit has experienced a similar ~$6,000 increase.
We should point out that you can build a Mac Studio cluster with 2 TB of RAM for around $50,000, so this might actually not be a great deal depending on who you are. However, if you’re running a server and need this kind of pool, you’re already past being shocked at these prices. The world moves differently up there.
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