My group has been trying to put together a workstation on the cheap for running some calculations. In the past the main barrier for these calculation has been insufficient memory, so basically we're looking to put together a cheap system (on the order of $1k) with as much RAM as possible.
When I originally looked into this, it looked like we could actually put together a system with 16 GB RAM for about that price (we don't need a monitor). The plan was to grab one of the many motherboards that support 16 GB of RAM and have 4 slots and then put four 4GB DIMMs of (non-ECC, non-registered) DDR2 in there, but while I was messing around with getting details on how to pay for it the supply of 4GB DIMMs seemed to totally dry up. That was more than a month ago, and I still can't find any reasonably priced modules like before. So the bottom line is this: Does anyone have any idea what might have happened? Is there any way to divine how long this drought might last? I've shopped for RAM plenty of times before and never had this happen, but then I was usually shopping for much lower end stuff. I figure maybe people with a bit more experience might have some insight. Regards, Nick
