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Crucial exiting the consumer memory market

You can try to change the memory settings in BIOS. In my rig I have two sets of 2x8GB, one is Corsair and the other set is Crucial. They are 3200MHz rated but one of them, I do not remember which one, do not work when XMP is enabled. So I have the memory frequency set to 2933MHz and everything is fine. I've run memtest for 24 hours and they do not fail at 2933MHz.
 
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You can try to change the memory settings in BIOS. In my rig I have two sets of 2x8GB, one is Corsair and the other set is Crucial. They are 3200MHz rated but one of them, I do not remember which one, do not work when XMP is enabled. So I have the memory frequency set to 2933MHz and everything is fine. I've run memtest for 24 hours and they do not fail at 2933MHz.
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Yes, I won't bore the thread to death with the details, but while I haven't tried every setting, I can't get these DDR5-6000 kits to run at anything close to their advertised overclock speed of 6000mhz. More importantly, they've been causing system instability even at their lowest speeds of 4800mhz. I found settings that work OK most of the time, but that's not good enough. Weirdly, the kit that was NOT on the motherboard QVL has less severe issues than the one that WAS.

The finicky nature of memory choice during the PC build process was not something I anticipated.

And to the point of this thread, losing a major consumer memory vendor is is going to make it that much harder to put together a good system in the future even if we ignore the ludicrous price inflation situation.
 
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Lord Blackadder said:
Even if an AI-bubble burst causes memory prices to crash, there are so few memory manufacturers that they are sure to be seen as too big to fail, in which case they'll be bailed out at taxpayer expense. They now have nothing to lose by abandoning consumers entirely.

The end result of this collusion between governments and the critical electronic component manufacturers is that everything is on the cloud and we own nothing, control nothing. We can't even switch to Linux, because we can't buy hardware.
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Or not.

The crash won't hurt the memory manufacturers. It just means their excess profits will go away.
The crash will hurt the speculators who invested in the AI companies.
 
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Non-Euclidean said:
The crash won't hurt the memory manufacturers. It just means their excess profits will go away.
The crash will hurt the speculators who invested in the AI companies.
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It could hurt everybody. But I agree that the chip fab industry currently serving the AI boom sems pretty well-insulated from failure at the moment. If we've learned anything from the AI bubble, it's that no matter what happens next, it seems like there will always be a big appetite for CPUs and memory from somewhere. If AI-driven purchases peter out, people will still be buying PCs, phones, tablets, smart devices, cars with infotainment systems etc etc.

So the relatively few makers of these precious chips probably feel like they're in a permanent win-win and don't really have to play nice with anybody. Ever.

This reminds me of the ammunition shortage that began during the COVID lockdown (stay with me here). Supply chain shortages and rising costs, coupled with profiteering and panic-buying, led to popular cries for manufacturers to set up more production lines. The manufacturers maxed out their existing capacity but generally refrained from big investment in new production capacity, citing capital costs and uncertain future demand. The shortage lasted about three years or so, though price inflation has never really gone away.

During this same period, bicycle manufacturers essentially did the opposite, greatly investing in expanded production to meet soaring demand for bikes. Different markets, but today the bicycle manufacturing industry is in a crisis, with many smaller manufacturers going bust or just clinging on (and this was before the Trump administration tariffs worsened things).
 
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Lord Blackadder said:
Yes, I won't bore the thread to death with the details, but while I haven't tried every setting, I can't get these DDR5-6000 kits to run at anything close to their advertised overclock speed of 6000mhz. More importantly, they've been causing system instability even at their lowest speeds of 4800mhz. I found settings that work OK most of the time, but that's not good enough. Weirdly, the kit that was NOT on the motherboard QVL has less severe issues than the one that WAS.

The finicky nature of memory choice during the PC build process was not something I anticipated.

And to the point of this thread, losing a major consumer memory vendor is is going to make it that much harder to put together a good system in the future even if we ignore the ludicrous price inflation situation.
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You are running the latest bios?
 
Lord Blackadder said:
Yes, I've done several bios updates over the course of my tinkering. I've looked around the internet but have not been able to confirm an example of anyone else successfully running an identical memory/mobo combo.
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The crazy part is the memory controller is on the cpu so the motherboard shouldn’t have as much sway on correctly spec’ed memory working as it seems to.
 
Lord Blackadder said:
It could hurt everybody. But I agree that the chip fab industry currently serving the AI boom sems pretty well-insulated from failure at the moment. If we've learned anything from the AI bubble, it's that no matter what happens next, it seems like there will always be a big appetite for CPUs and memory from somewhere. If AI-driven purchases peter out, people will still be buying PCs, phones, tablets, smart devices, cars with infotainment systems etc etc.

So the relatively few makers of these precious chips probably feel like they're in a permanent win-win and don't really have to play nice with anybody. Ever.

This reminds me of the ammunition shortage that began during the COVID lockdown (stay with me here). Supply chain shortages and rising costs, coupled with profiteering and panic-buying, led to popular cries for manufacturers to set up more production lines. The manufacturers maxed out their existing capacity but generally refrained from big investment in new production capacity, citing capital costs and uncertain future demand. The shortage lasted about three years or so, though price inflation has never really gone away.

During this same period, bicycle manufacturers essentially did the opposite, greatly investing in expanded production to meet soaring demand for bikes. Different markets, but today the bicycle manufacturing industry is in a crisis, with many smaller manufacturers going bust or just clinging on (and this was before the Trump administration tariffs worsened things).
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No, we aren't seeing 5.56 at .33/round regularly from NatchezSS, but it did start to get below .50/round. Some of that price inflation has gone away. Primers have come down a bit also. To say the inflation has never gone away doesn't reflect the market. You aren't paying Covid prices now. Aside from Covid, huge demand swings were also native to the firearms and ammo industries because of politics and who was (or was expected to be) in office. A bunch of firearm friendly decisions in the courts and 2 Trump victories have kept a lot of expected price hikes in check. Right now ARs are the cheapest they have been at the bottom of the market, reliable ones (PSA, et. al.). It has caused some contraction in the industry where some players didn't see large enough margins remaining and left/sold out (Anderson).

When the AI bubble pops, prices will return to normality. Maybe not all the way, but significantly. There is a ton more innovation in storage tech compared to firearms. That drives competition and has been overall keeping things competitive. So no, I don't think your analogy works and I believe the current AI demand driven market effects will reverse to a significant degree. We were already seeing it in consumer GPU pricing. Obviously not at the top end where NVidia is selling cards without lube but at other price points, which were all stupid during the crapto mining craze.
 
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Non-Euclidean said:
No, we aren't seeing 5.56 at .33/round regularly from NatchezSS, but it did start to get below .50/round. Some of that price inflation has gone away. Primers have come down a bit also. To say the inflation has never gone away doesn't reflect the market. You aren't paying Covid prices now. Aside from Covid, huge demand swings were also native to the firearms and ammo industries because of politics and who was (or was expected to be) in office. A bunch of firearm friendly decisions in the courts and 2 Trump victories have kept a lot of expected price hikes in check. Right now ARs are the cheapest they have been at the bottom of the market, reliable ones (PSA, et. al.). It has caused some contraction in the industry where some players didn't see large enough margins remaining and left/sold out (Anderson).
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I agree that some of the inflation has gone away. But not all of it. Admittedly, I haven’t been keeping tabs over the last twelve months and am surprised to see they’ve really dropped in 2025. So the COVID panic took about 5 years to wear off.

Non-Euclidean said:
When the AI bubble pops, prices will return to normality. Maybe not all the way, but significantly. There is a ton more innovation in storage tech compared to firearms. That drives competition and has been overall keeping things competitive. So no, I don't think your analogy works and I believe the current AI demand driven market effects will reverse to a significant degree. We were already seeing it in consumer GPU pricing. Obviously not at the top end where NVidia is selling cards without lube but at other price points, which were all stupid during the crapto mining craze.
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I agree that is possible, and I hope you’re right. But I can also envision a post-AI bubble market where consumers are increasingly forced to relinquish the ability to buy and own things, and corporations get more and more products and services (appliances, cars) completely unnecessarily tied to tiered-feature cloud subscriptions. Planned obsolescence enters a new phase of all-encompassing intensity. Data center demand for hardware remains high, consumer supply is constrained, consumer costs stay high.
 
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