DDR4 End of Life

For years DDR4 was the obvious budget choice: a mature product with huge supply and steadily falling prices. That era is over. Memory manufacturers are winding down DDR4 production and reallocating fab capacity to DDR5 and to the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that AI and data-center customers are consuming at unprecedented scale. HBM uses several times the wafer area of standard DDR5 per gigabyte, so every unit of AI demand removes a disproportionate slice of the capacity that used to make consumer memory.

The result is a market that no longer behaves like a normal end-of-life cycle. Last-generation parts normally get steadily cheaper and stay easy to find as they age out; DDR4 instead is getting scarcer while a large installed base of AM4 and older Intel systems still needs it. At new-kit retail, that scarcity means DDR4 frequently matches or exceeds DDR5 per gigabyte, the dynamic our DDR4 vs DDR5 price guide covers in depth. Analysts expect the broader DRAM squeeze to persist into 2027–2028, so this is not a blip that patience is guaranteed to fix.

What does RamRadar's own index show? As of August 27, 2026, desktop DDR4 averages $7.91/GB against $16.35/GB for DDR5, DDR4 trading $8.44/GB below its successor here. Across the last 30 days with data for both generations, DDR4 averaged above DDR5 on 0 of them, and DDR4's mean $/GB has moved +17.0% over the past 90 days. Note that this index includes eBay marketplace listings alongside Newegg and B&H, so it reflects what DDR4 actually sells for across the whole market, not just new-kit shelf prices.