DDR4 jumped from 100 to 600: Intel and AMD are stepping aside in unison — is now the time to buy memory? In early October at Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei, a vendor pointed to the memory sticks in the cabinet and said that a 16GB DDR4 stick cost just over a hundred yuan at its cheapest last year, but now the lowest price is over six hundred; a 16GB DDR5 stick once sold for just over two hundred yuan, but now the minimum is over one thousand four hundred. A thirty percent increase in a year — this isn't a joke, it's the spot goods in the vendors' hands.

💡 What You Will Learn

DDR4 jumped from 100 to 600: Intel and AMD are stepping aside in unison — is now the time to buy memory? In early October at Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei, a vendor pointed to the memory sticks in the cabine

📜 Table of Contents

• Gigabyte's Move Is Blunt: Entire Motherboard Lineup Supports New CPUs
• AMD Made Its Move Even Earlier
• Should You Buy Now: Three Judgments
• My Take

DDR4 Went from 100 to 600: Intel and AMD Are Both Stepping Aside — Should You Buy RAM Now?

In early October at Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei, a vendor pointed at the RAM sticks in his cabinet and said: a 16GB DDR4 module cost just over a hundred yuan at its cheapest last year — now the minimum is over six hundred. A 16GB DDR5 module used to sell for just over two hundred yuan; now the floor is above fourteen hundred.

A thirty percent jump in a year — that's not a joke, that's the spot quote in the vendor's hand.

The root cause isn't complicated: AI data centers have eaten up memory production capacity. AI servers need 8 to 10 times more memory than ordinary servers, and the profit margins are far higher, so manufacturers naturally prioritize that segment. By some estimates, roughly 40% of global DRAM capacity has already been consumed by AI, and the storage cost share in phones has jumped from 10–15% in 2024 to 30–40%.

Yu Chengdong's statement at the end of September was blunt: memory component prices have surged so sharply that each phone costs over $200 more, and Huawei's overall profit margin is dropping rapidly.

At this rate, people saving up to upgrade their PCs can't make the math work. Intel and AMD's solution is the same — bring back a decade-old technology and make DDR4 usable again.

Gigabyte's Move Is Blunt: Entire Motherboard Lineup Supports New CPUs

On October 9, Gigabyte officially announced that its entire B760 and H610 motherboard lineup would support "upcoming" LGA 1700 processors via BIOS updates.

LGA 1700 is the socket that debuted with 12th-gen Core (Alder Lake) in 2021, supporting both DDR4 and DDR5 at the time. After Intel went DDR5-only in 2024, dual-format support for this socket was cut off. Now dual-format is back, with the new processors expected to launch in early 2027.

Gigabyte's framing for this update is "letting users on older platforms upgrade their CPU without changing motherboards." Against the backdrop of rising memory prices, this move is widely interpreted as — leaving a path for budget-constrained users that doesn't require swapping RAM. But note: Gigabyte's press release never once mentions "memory shortage." Restarting DDR4 support is their own product-cadence decision; the external correlation and the manufacturer's motivation are two different things.

An interesting detail: Gigabyte's full-lineup support this time only covers B760 and H610 — it does not include the flagship Z790. This shows DDR4's return isn't a wholesale regression, but a precise positioning at the entry and mid-range segments — a cost-tiering patch, not a technical rollback.

AMD Made Its Move Even Earlier

AMD acted two months before Intel.

Back in August, Gigabyte announced new motherboards for AMD's previous-gen AM4 platform, timed with the tenth-anniversary re-release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The AM4 platform uses DDR4.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is still widely regarded in gaming circles as the value benchmark. AMD restarting it at the tenth-anniversary mark is itself an exit ramp for users who "can't afford to jump to the new AM5 platform."

The logic for both manufacturers is identical: new platforms are expensive; old platforms still run. When a user's budget is limited, building a capable machine with DDR4 is more practical than forcing DDR5.

Should You Buy Now: Three Judgments

If you have DDR4 on hand, don't toss it yet.

The price of used DDR4 is actually rising right now — this isn't a good time to upgrade opportunistically, but if your machine still works, hang onto those sticks. For at least the next year, you won't face a forced generational swap where "a new CPU only works with DDR5."

For new builds, the DDR4 platform is worth running the numbers on.

Here's the reference pricing: a 32GB DDR5 kit runs about $620, while the same capacity in DDR4 is only $260 — more than double the difference. And in gaming scenarios, DDR5's performance advantage over DDR4 is typically 5% to 10%. For the same money, what you save is enough to bump up a tier on your GPU or get a bigger SSD.

That said, if you do video editing, 3D rendering, or other bandwidth-hungry professional work, or plan to use one machine for five-plus years, DDR5's 10% edge and greater future headroom are still worth paying extra for.

Don't count on waiting for prices to drop.

The general consensus among manufacturers and channel partners is that this price-hike cycle will last until 2029 or even 2030. Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have been shifting wafer capacity to HBM and server memory since Q2 2025, and consumer DRAM production lines have long been insufficient — manufacturers have no incentive to switch those lines back, because server memory earns far more.

Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra put it plainly on the earnings call: the gap in structural supply-demand growth rates has led to persistent supply tightness, and there's no visible inflection point for when supply and demand will rebalance.

My Take

This isn't Intel and AMD regressing technically — quite the opposite. It's the supply chain repricing.

AI has consumed consumer-grade memory capacity, forcing two CPU makers to pick up old sockets they abandoned years ago. On the surface it looks like "a decade-old technology is back," but in reality the market has been forcibly split into two tiers: those with ample budget buy DDR5 plus a new platform for performance, while those with tight budgets hold the line with DDR4 plus an old platform.

For consumers, this is actually good news — between the two tiers, you have room to choose, rather than having a manufacturer unilaterally define "what counts as a competent computer."

But if you were already planning a build this year, by now you've probably figured it out: what's really worth grabbing is old DDR4 inventory, not new DDR5 capacity.