My take : Prices got you down ? Keep the hardware you already have ! No one else can upgrade anyway, games requirements aren’t going up anytime soon.
Obviously that doesn’t cover you if you don’t already have a machine, in which case I would go DDR3.
But for those who do, does anyone upgrade anymore ? I’m on 2019 hardware and everything runs perfectly good. Oftentimes great !
Also using 2019 hardware! I dread the day something dies, though. Luckily I upgraded to 32gb of RAM the last time it was super cheap. I’m hoping this machine has another ten years in it.
It probably depends on what you do, but 16GB is still able to do everything I personally need from my computer. I wish I had more VRAM though, 12GB is getting a little short for some AAA releases (fortunately I rarely play AAA games)
Yeah, I probably don’t need 32gb either, but RAM was so cheap at the time, and it gave me the chance to put my old 16gb into my work PC which was down to 8 since a stick died on me.
100%. I did get a 32gb mini pc this summer. win 11 is not as stable as win 10 on ddr3, mostly sleep/monitor issues. and 780m on ddr5 is about the same for gaming as 1660s on ddr3. Don’t chase gaming frame rates until prices get more reasonable. If you somehow don’t have a PC more recent than ddr3, then it’s not time to get into gaming, but upgrading cpu/gpu and an extra 16gb ram is likely the better value compared to new system.
But why did my millenial heart immediately think of Dance Dance Revolution???
I bought an 8G ECC RDIMM DDR4 the other day for 15 bucks cash.
Guy around my age who “bought the wrong kind” for his laptop, and forgot about it until it was too late to return it.
I’m gonna hold onto it a little longer, then see if I can’t make 30 or 40 bucks off it. 🤣
I think passing it along for the price you got it at to someone who will be stoked to use it will be more rewarding than making such a small profit

I bought one of these 64GB packs for less than $50 not even a year ago
TIL I have about $8000 in ram sitting in a drawer.
I don’t know how to feel about this…
I retire PCs at the college I work at. They get stacked in the basement waiting on an inventory/recycling procedure that will never happen because we’re a satellite campus and the basement is the tomb of technology. Went down there the other day to bring a retired PC up to replace a very old lab PC that died. The HD had been removed by a colleague - fine, that’s procedure - and then I realized all the RAM had been stripped out. Dozens and dozens of PCs with nary a stick. “If you’re selling that RAM, I want in on it” I told him. He laughed nervously and said no, but wouldn’t say where it all was.
I am not kidding, I want halfsies…
Here I was thinking they were recommending a game that ran well with low RAM or something. Like WTF is Dead Dead Redemption 3?
Nooooooo nonononoooooo…Dance Dance Revolution 3 👍
Found 16GB DDR4 from and old swap the other day. I’m protecting that stuff like it’s an investment now. But seriously, def hanging on to it just in case anything dies.
On the look out for storage deals now. But I’m not hopeful.
I jumped on some large external HDD deals before storage took a jump. I don’t want to move to subscription cloud services like the billionaires want to happen.
Wish I had gotten a m.2 2230 drive too for my Deck so I missed out on that.
Bought my am5 pc late 2023, bought extra storage and a new phone last summer. I don’t need anything right now but I can’t wait for this bubble to pop.
I lucked out so hard, I just built my PC in September.
Did an AI write this?
My pc uses DDR2 and it runs Linux with no problem. I can even game, just not the new ones
DDR3 isn’t still what everyone’s using anyway?
Huh, I guess it has been a few years since I looked in to RAM…
I had 96 GB DDR3 for sale and no one even looked at the ad. $20.
“Can’t compete with the global super rich? Lower your standards and be happy!”
This is how existence works, yes. Being happy means adjusting your wants to what you have.
yeah, people who live in the US of A should be just happy they are still alive!
Being happy means adjusting your wants to what you have.
Oh I guess I should be happy that ICE only raided my neighbors and not me. Amirite?
No, numbnuts. It means you shouldn’t be happy.
but you can’t compete with them. you should really be adjusting your wants! be happy you are alive
Well…yes? Are you not happy you did not get raided? Would you rather have had that you also got raided?
My point is: Just because someone isn’t “suffering as much as others” doesn’t mean the stuff they go through (like the fears of ICE for example) aren’t valid.
Both points are true:
- You can recognize that, yes you have it better than others.
BUT ALSO:
- It doesn’t mean you should accept status quo forever.
Because accepting status quo is like saying, “why are you complaining about trump? at least you aren’t in taliban afghanistan or north korea”
Yes we all know…and clearly you’re the only.one who didn’t get it
💩 take
Fuck Buddhism, amirite?
If you’re upset with my feedback, adjust your expectations.
That’s exactly the point. I’m not upset because I don’t expect people online to have any sort of sense. I adjusted that expectation long ago and I’m much happier for it.
But you seem to be assuming that I’m saying everyone should just drop their expectations and be happy. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that suffering is caused by desire. So if you can reduce your desire, you can reduce your suffering.
But many times you can’t, or shouldn’t, reduce your desire. I won’t ever desire to be okay with what’s happening in my country, for example. I choose to be unhappy with it.
So choose to be fucking unhappy. It’s okay to be unhappy. I’m not going to judge you for it.
What’s the difference between that and suppressing your true feelings? From my perspective, it just seems like a strategy for bottling up what you actually feel rather than letting your true feelings out. On the surface at least, it sounds like that’s a recipe for it blowing up at some point in a much worse way?
The difference is changing your mind.
Isn’t this a tenet of Buddhism?
Yep, that’s all it is. Desire is the cause of suffering.
Which isn’t to say you should never desire anything. Just know the price and choose.
Ddr3 was kind of the point where the technology stopped incrementing with large jumps.
Not saying ddr3 is as good as ddr4 or 5 but I used ddr3 until 2021 with no issue.
I’m still using DDR3 as I haven’t upgraded my computer in like 6years. It’s fine. I can play most games at 4k and I’m rocking an Nvidia 4070. I don’t really see any compelling reason to upgrade until GTA6 comes out. (I can play gta5 just fine)
Same but 2024. I missed all of DDR4. Jumped straight from 3 to 5.
I went 2 to 4, and honestly my 5800x w 32GB DDR4 @3800 from 2020 is still just fine, hopefully till this shitshow shakes out.
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).
You have a small sever as a daily driver
Small?
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.
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).
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.
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
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
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.
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