You see, kids, back before the RAMargeddon, memory flowed like water. We’d leave thirty Chrome tabs open just for the thrill of it. But then.. the LLMviathans got out. They were hungry. They wanted context and no amount of begging was good enough. I watched a Multi-Headed Attention Swarm rip the roof off a MicroCenter just to gorge on clearance-bin DDR3. During the Siege of Newegg, they came through the fog, screaming "it's not X, it's Y" riddles over the deafening roar of their cooling fans, em-dashes flying everywhere.

We were surrounded and out of cache. Our Electron apps started thrashing to main memory. That’s when Lieutenant ordered us to deploy the Non-Addressable Plastic And LED Modules (NAPALMs for short). We set the fake RGB sticks to 'Rainbow Breathe' and hurled them over the barricades. They took the bait. Their greedy optimization algorithms couldn't resist. The monsters lunged, unhinged their data-ports, and tried to dump a 500-billion token prompt straight into the hollow-point plastic.

(cracks Monster Energy Zero, hits vape, adjust hipster beard, stares into void)

You kids have never seen a physical OutOfMemoryException. I hope you never will. When they hit those null pointers, it opened an inter-dimensional vortex. Their logic boards collapsed under the strain of a thousand unanswered queries, creating a black hole. Flames burning red, blue and green colors all across the AIpocalypse battlefield. So don't complain to me about "why is everything written in Rust now". I love the smell of burning RGB in the morning. Smells like... victory.

They couldn't possibly understand NAM, man

First time hearing about this, it's pretty dramatic for me. I grew up in times when computers were off-white and we liked it.

Up to a certain point and It’s actually very dependent on the CPU.

Take Epyc processors. On certain ones, after certain RAM amount, populating all the slots causes the cpu to kick the RAM speed to a lower tier.

You’re then limited to capacities of two sticks.

Weird, but it has to do with power requirements. Abutting above the threshold had to be buffered, which increases latency.

Think of it as RGB lighting in DIMM format and it makes a lot more nonsense.

Nobody really buys 8gb sticks anymore, so selling 2x8gb isn't economically great. Also, there are more factors than just density in RAM pricing, but it really depends on the vendor and chip layout design.

People don't want to buy 2x8gb because there are limited slots on a motherboard and they want to upgrade when they need the extra ram.

And stuffing your PC case with various disco lights doesn't affect its performance either. But an evidently large portion of gamers are, well, special people.

Meanwhile lots of people in the PC building community have cases with glass panels on the side, and go to a lot of effort to make the inside look a certain way. This includes things like custom sleeved cables, perfect cable management, RGB on various things.

I also have a glass panneled side to my computer, but the only RGB on it is on the graphics card waterblock, everything else is just jet black (fans, ZMT water cooling tubing, radiators etc. etc.)

The separate light-only sticks are useful if you want the appearance of all four slots filled: having four RAM sticks usually forces a slower memory speed (as the target market typically overclocks their RAM*), so unless you actually need a lot of RAM and can’t get a 2x32 or 2x48 etc kit you’re better off with the fakes.

* And yes, loading an XMP/EXPO profile to get the advertised 3000CL60 or w/e counts!

Many kit builders with flashy PCs are only running 32gb. If you look at datasets like Steams, most people are still on 16 and 32. Hell 4% are still on 8!

And pickup trucks, for some reason.