DDR3 seemed plenty fast when it first showed up 19 years ago. Who could say no to 6400 Mb/s transfer speeds? Of course compared to the modern DDR5 that’s glacially slow, but given that RAM is…
The biggest problem with DDR3 is that the last (consumer) boards/CPUs that could use it are really, REALLY old. 5th-gen Intel or AM3 AMD. Which means you’re looking at a full decade old, at the newest. These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.
Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.
My daily driver is a PowerEdge T620 with 48 Ivy Bridge cores (2x E5-2969 v2) and 384 GiB of DDR3-1333. It’s a bit of a power hog yes, but it’s still cheaper than upgrading to a more modern system with at least that much DDR4/5, and the only things where performance has been an obstacle has been a few more recent games (most recently Clair Obscur, which was bottlenecked by my GPU with the CPUs at pretty low utilization).
This is basically the exact scenario that led me to detail that I was only talking about consumer gear. Server gear is a very different beast, with a variety of tradeoffs that I didn’t want to get into. For instance, I’m assuming you can only use Registered RAM.
For a general use or gaming PC, 32GB is more than enough for the majority of users. It might show its limits with use as a server or dedicated database using complex queries.
Heck, even as servers go, I’ve got an AMD mini-PC running a Ryzen 5700u with 32 GB RAM. It’s running Plex, Jellyfin, AudioBookShelf, Home Assistant, Asset UPnP, and a few other apps, plus has some small extra VMs occasionally for testing stuff and I’m hardly utilizing it, nowhere near capacity. I’m never using more than 8 out of 16 threads, and about half the RAM is still available even under full load scenarios when I’m running updates and using Plex heavily (such as scanning intros, or doing acoustic analysis for Plexamp use).
Most of the time under normal use, it’s practically idle, and RAM use is low (Proxmox with memory minimums and ballooning).
lol my main pc runs on a Xeon from 2011 and 16 GB of DDR3. Now it doesn’t play games newer than 2016 but that’s besides the point as I rarely play anything made past 2011
The list of vulnerability mitigations for those old CPUs is going to be a mile long. They will probably have their performance cut in half or worse. Even a much newer CPU like Zen 1 takes a big performance hit.
You can disable mitigations, but then a malicious website could potentially steal sensitive information on that computer.
I’ve been doing active development for high processing stuff (computer vision and AI) on a Xeon 1230v5 (Skylake), 32GB of RAM, and a 1080ti up until a few months ago (before RAM prices skyrocketed). It was perfectly usable.
The only place where it didn’t do well was in compile times and newer AAA games that were CPU bound. But for 99% of games it was fine.
The only time I ran into RAM issues was when I had a lot of browser tabs open and multiple IDEs running. For gaming and any other non-dev task, 32GB is more than plenty.
There are server chips like the E7-8891 v3 which lived in a weird middle ground of supporting both ddr3 and ddr4. On paper, it’s about on par with a ryzen 5 5500 and they’re about $20 on US eBay. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an aftermarket/used server board to see if it holds up the way it appears to on paper. $20 for a CPU (could even slot 2), $80 for a board, $40 for 32gb of ddr3 in quad chanel. ~$160 for a set of core components doesn’t seem that bad in modern times, especially if you can use quad/oct channel to offset the bandwidth difference between ddr3 and ddr4.
I think finding a cooler and a case would be the hardest part
Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.
It’s not that bad. For the most part, it would still be a viable machine these days, though weaker than it used to be. Computers haven’t changed quite as much as they used to, compared to the period leading into the 2010s.
My desktop is still a 4th gen intel. You’re not going to get bleeding-edge performance or efficiency out of it, but it’s hardly a slug. If anything, I’d argue it to more likely be the majority of computers. People don’t upgrade that often, especially if the computer works fine and doesn’t lag horribly.
The biggest problem with DDR3 is that the last (consumer) boards/CPUs that could use it are really, REALLY old. 5th-gen Intel or AM3 AMD. Which means you’re looking at a full decade old, at the newest. These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.
Now, I suppose if you only need 32GB RAM and a CPU that’s pathetic by modern standards, then this is a viable path. But that’s going to be a very small group of people.
My daily driver is a PowerEdge T620 with 48 Ivy Bridge cores (2x E5-2969 v2) and 384 GiB of DDR3-1333. It’s a bit of a power hog yes, but it’s still cheaper than upgrading to a more modern system with at least that much DDR4/5, and the only things where performance has been an obstacle has been a few more recent games (most recently Clair Obscur, which was bottlenecked by my GPU with the CPUs at pretty low utilization).
This is basically the exact scenario that led me to detail that I was only talking about consumer gear. Server gear is a very different beast, with a variety of tradeoffs that I didn’t want to get into. For instance, I’m assuming you can only use Registered RAM.
Fair enough, it seems I overlooked the parenthesis in your original comment.
You have a small sever as a daily driver
Small?
For a general use or gaming PC, 32GB is more than enough for the majority of users. It might show its limits with use as a server or dedicated database using complex queries.
Heck, even as servers go, I’ve got an AMD mini-PC running a Ryzen 5700u with 32 GB RAM. It’s running Plex, Jellyfin, AudioBookShelf, Home Assistant, Asset UPnP, and a few other apps, plus has some small extra VMs occasionally for testing stuff and I’m hardly utilizing it, nowhere near capacity. I’m never using more than 8 out of 16 threads, and about half the RAM is still available even under full load scenarios when I’m running updates and using Plex heavily (such as scanning intros, or doing acoustic analysis for Plexamp use).
Most of the time under normal use, it’s practically idle, and RAM use is low (Proxmox with memory minimums and ballooning).
lol my main pc runs on a Xeon from 2011 and 16 GB of DDR3. Now it doesn’t play games newer than 2016 but that’s besides the point as I rarely play anything made past 2011
Oh so you like good games too?
Haha
The list of vulnerability mitigations for those old CPUs is going to be a mile long. They will probably have their performance cut in half or worse. Even a much newer CPU like Zen 1 takes a big performance hit.
You can disable mitigations, but then a malicious website could potentially steal sensitive information on that computer.
I’ve been doing active development for high processing stuff (computer vision and AI) on a Xeon 1230v5 (Skylake), 32GB of RAM, and a 1080ti up until a few months ago (before RAM prices skyrocketed). It was perfectly usable.
The only place where it didn’t do well was in compile times and newer AAA games that were CPU bound. But for 99% of games it was fine.
The only time I ran into RAM issues was when I had a lot of browser tabs open and multiple IDEs running. For gaming and any other non-dev task, 32GB is more than plenty.
Its been good for my homelab
There are server chips like the E7-8891 v3 which lived in a weird middle ground of supporting both ddr3 and ddr4. On paper, it’s about on par with a ryzen 5 5500 and they’re about $20 on US eBay. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an aftermarket/used server board to see if it holds up the way it appears to on paper. $20 for a CPU (could even slot 2), $80 for a board, $40 for 32gb of ddr3 in quad chanel. ~$160 for a set of core components doesn’t seem that bad in modern times, especially if you can use quad/oct channel to offset the bandwidth difference between ddr3 and ddr4.
I think finding a cooler and a case would be the hardest part
It’s not that bad. For the most part, it would still be a viable machine these days, though weaker than it used to be. Computers haven’t changed quite as much as they used to, compared to the period leading into the 2010s.
My desktop is still a 4th gen intel. You’re not going to get bleeding-edge performance or efficiency out of it, but it’s hardly a slug. If anything, I’d argue it to more likely be the majority of computers. People don’t upgrade that often, especially if the computer works fine and doesn’t lag horribly.
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