While browsing through our offerings, it occurred to me that I haven’t equipped any systems with AMD’s beastly new Ryzen architecture. I asked myself why this was the case, and began to run through a Ryzen system that could theoretically show up on our store. What it basically came down to was the issue with DDR4 pricing. There’s a bit of a memory shortage worldwide, which has driven the price for RAM higher and higher over the past few years (I’ll tackle that in another post down the road). Ryzen is meant to be an affordable competitor to Intel, which it certainly has proven to be, but it requires DDR4 memory, which is not as affordable.
So why is this a problem? We already have plenty of products with DDR4 in them. Yes, we do, but I’m comfortable with those systems as they are, at least as of my writing this post. When building a Ryzen system in my head earlier, I was building a replacement to some of our more affordable models of computers. The less expensive options that we offer run on admittedly aging hardware, and I thought that it would be a good time to update the listings to more modern and still affordable hardware. Sadly, the RAM shortage does not allow this. If we see the demand for updated systems, or if memory pricing comes down to a reasonable level, I will absolutely go through and update all of our last-generation products, but until that time, I am confident that the configurations we provide will be suitable.