Where there’s a shortage there are scams, and the DRAM crisis is no exception with one unlucky individual falling foul of a crooked seller. While the DDR5 memory they purchased certainly looked the part at first, closer examination revealed they’d been sold a DDR4 kit instead.
Sharing their story on the PC Master Race subreddit, user Leading-Growth-8361 purchased what they believed to be a 32GB dual-channel kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 RAM. This wasn’t a brand-new set, instead originating from Amazon Warehouse, but were sold and dispatched by the storefront.
However, after unpacking the RAM from its retail packaging, they noticed the heat spreaders were “super loose.” Thinking nothing of it, they proceeded with installation only to find the sticks would not marry with the DIMM slots of their MSI Pro B850-S motherboard.
New Ram replaced with Old sticks in DDR5 casing..
byu/Leading-Growth-8361 inpcmasterrace
Comparing their new sticks to another set of DDR4 they had from their previous system, the contact layout matched exactly. Lo and behold, someone had extracted the DDR5 RAM and then stuck the heatsinks to an older DDR4 kit before sending them back to Amazon as a return.
This is a failing on Amazon’s part, and I’d think twice before purchasing any kits from the storefront until the current market situation resolves itself, particularly from Amazon Warehouse. Thankfully, Leading-Growth-8361 has received a full refund plus an additional ~£100 given the price of the kit has increased substantially since their purchase.
In case anyone’s wondering, the memory that Leading-Growth-8361 thought they had retails for just shy of £400 time of writing. Before consumer RAM grew scarce, you could’ve picked up this very same kit for around £130. That’s a tripling of cost in the space of three months.
This Redditor won’t be the last person to fall for such a scam, so please do keep your wits about you when purchasing any second-hand DDR5 RAM. If you can’t buy new, then I’d either advise holding off until you can afford to or changing tactics.
Even in the wake of bonkers RAM pricing, there are still plenty of prebuilds from system integrators that can help curb the cost of an upgrade. Alternatively, if you’re still rocking an older system, check out Ben’s recommendations of the best DDR4 CPUs and motherboards to give your current rig some new life.
The RAM and SSD shortage isn’t going away anytime soon, with consequences reaching far beyond the realms of discrete memory kits for consumer PCs. This affects GPUs too, with Nvidia allegedly winding down production and whispers of AMD price increases in response to market pressures. Meanwhile, motherboard sales have plummeted as people can’t pair them with appropriate memory.
I wish I had better news to share regarding the future of PCs, but the moment I do you can bet you’ll find it on our Google News feed.
