Just dusted off my old desktop and set it up as a server.
Glad I still have it. I might buy more DDR3 if I need it. I’m sorry for those who don’t have a CPU/motherboard already to support it.
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…
DDR3 isn’t still what everyone’s using anyway?
Huh, I guess it has been a few years since I looked in to RAM…
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 !
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.
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)
I bought a new video card right after Trump won. But yeah now I’m ready to use my current hardware for a good long while.
I love how “After Trump won” is a legit basepoint when everything went to shit, even if unrelated (AI was going to happen regardless of politics)
Yeah you had a brief window to prepare for things getting really bad.
I’m fine on DDR4. DDR5 feels to me, something I’ll get into in like 5 - 10 years from now. This is from someone who has sat on DDR2 and DDR3 machines for extended periods of time. If they’re still doing the job I want them to, no complaints.
When i looked for ddre mobos they were expensive af. Is it possible to use ddr3 in a ddr4 or 5 mobo? Is there an adapter or something?
No
Are you looking at new? Look at used, off eBay or whatever is in your country.
But everything is more expensive right now anyway.
I’m about to go dumpster diving for ram or some shit, holy fuck the prices are fucked
“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.
Isn’t this a Genet 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.
“I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
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.
If we were talking about stuff like healthcare, food, housing, electricity, clean water, public transit, or access to information, I’d be on the same page.
But this is a luxury hobby. And with luxury hobbies, there’s usually some flexibility. You don’t need a high-end PC to play games. You can run plenty on a lower-end setup, try different genres, or even step away from PC gaming altogether.
You could have friends over for a tabletop game, go for a run, hit the gym, or try something like rock climbing. There are lots of ways to spend your time without needing top-tier gear
Just because they’ve trained you to believe you need the latest 2nm chips (which is conveniently their highest margin product) doesn’t mean you really need them.
So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.
Personal computers of today don’t give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.
Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.
In year 2006 they’d say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don’t do that now, because then you’d be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.
It’s just sad.
I would agree, if websites and webapps wouldn’t be so bloated as they are. if the rich wouldn’t make us to downgrade out of their gluttony. but also, old technology is not that easily available. production lines have been shut down long ago, and if everyone went to the used market, nothing would be available even there anymore.
For most people, computers became powerful enough around the year 2005. A machine from late in the Windows XP era could run 3D games, CAD software, edit video, communicate with the entire world through broadband internet. What abilities have PCs taken on since? So much processing power filled up by doing the same tasks less efficiently for no reason.
Well CAD software has made leaps and bounds since then. Anyone who used CAD back in the day would know what an unstable clusterfuck it was and how much longer it took than now.
A lot of software has gotten much better, including “core” Foss like Linux and FFMPEG. There is just 10x as much software that is horrible, and windows has gotten so much worse to the point that it feels like computers have made no progress when you use it.
Also, CPUs nowadays use about the same power as they did 20 years ago but with an order of magnitude more processing power, and the idle power consumption is much much much lower. The first Core 2 Duo had a 65W TDP, the same as modern Ryzen 5. GPUs are just out of hand with power consumption because of profit-driven game companies and AI.
I will assert that, again, for most people, instead of computers remaining at the same TDP but increasing vastly in processing power, they would have been fine with the same processing power at vastly decreased TDP. Look at how long people held onto Win 7, and how long they held onto Win XP before that. Because they were fine, possibly better than the new offering, especially since you already owned it. Some time around 2012, anyone who wasn’t a power user ran out of reasons to get excited for new computers.
I agree. Most people are spoiled little lazy ass brats now. Im so glad i wasn’t born any later so I can actually appreciate what we have.
At the same time, fuck these billionaire accelerstioniats for trying to destroy earth while taking what little enjoyment away we can have.
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.
I think this is actually most people. Power users and hardcore gamers are a relatively small portion of the PC market.
I would be surprised if this is still true, at least for home use. It seems like the non-gamer, non-power user segment of the PC market just switched over to tablets and smartphones instead. PCs and laptops just aren’t really necessary anymore for “normal” people who just want to check their email, watch YouTube, and surf the web.
Non-gamers only. I recently replaced my mobo by a slightly older (the model, the board itself was brand new) industrial PC board. 32GB DDR3, NVidia Quadro K2200, 2 x gigabit ethernet, USB 3.1, five serial ports, three programmable digital IO ports, hardware watchdog, i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz. It’s a Loonix machine and I don’t use it for gaming but I do a lot of animation, video editing, µcontroller programming and 3D-modelling with it. Super reliable, fast enough for most stuff. If I need more raytracing power, I just cluster it with my Lenovo p15.
I can see that eating into some PC use, but plenty of Millennials I know still prefer laptops or even desktops for casual use.
I intentionally ignore the vast majority of everything on my phone until I can get to a real computer. Phones and tablets feel like unmitigated torture and I loathe it every time I have to use one to do something
like this is anecdotal but most of my family has PC’s that are getting a bit long in the tooth but they still use it just fine for all the basic internet shit they do. Alot of folks would rather check their banking or emails on a bigger screen. My mom’s computer for example is almost 10 years old, if I throw Linux on it she’s good till the thing just up and dies.
She asked about buying a new PC this year and I just laughed and said “no, you enjoy having a roof over your head right?”
Yeah, my mom asked me for suggestions on a new computer since hers couldn’t do win11, so I just threw mint on it. She had no trouble making the switch.
As someone with a high end PC I can also spend a happy afternoon with my gameboy advance that has less than half a megabyte of RAM, so even in a power user and gamer context the hardware is what you make of it. There’s so much more out there than just the latest and most pathetically optimized titles.
Non-power users would have no operating system, no Windows 11 support and grandma isn’t going to learn Linux
That’s what the hardware requirement bypass and a techie friend are for.
I manage a whole computer lab full of 3rd to 5th gen Intels with 8GB of RAM that run Windows 11 just fine.
hardware requirement bypass? hell no. at that point 10 LTSC and activation bypass
For personal use maybe. Not for a public organization that can get sued into oblivion if caught pirating.
Grandma doesn’t need to “learn” Linux
Most of the older generation compute almost entirely through a web browser. They often struggle with the amount of notifications / solicitations that come up in a a Windows OS, as they can have trouble discerning between what is real and what is a scam - becoming fundamentally distrustful of everything as a result.
Through my repair shop, I’ve transitioned plenty of older generation folks to Linux Mint with minimal friction.
Main area where that can get a bit more complicated is for those who are clinging to an older piece of software they’re unwilling to let go of.
I exclusively use Linux and have several family members who have Linux laptops.
I don’t think it is impossible, but they require someone in their life that can handle the issues.
They’re going to have a much harder time finding support for a Linux machine than a Windows machine.
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.
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
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
These server boards are usually the same as scientific and engineering workstation boards. They’re pretty good if you put the right CPU in. Xeon or i7 4770 and you’ll get a quite useable workstation out of them.
These boards also probably can’t do more than 32GB.
what is the difference between this and having new board, but not being able to afford that 32gb anyway?
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.
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).
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.
I mean DDR3 is provably fine. I ran a 16GB DDR3 machine with a goddamn 2500k up until several years ago and pre-2020 games usually ran fine, on playable framerates ( i did have win7, not sure how win10 fares ). Question is: who is this article for? Most tech enhusiasts have probably moved on by now, and even those are a small subset of PC users. “Normies”? Those moved on to phones and tables - it’s why MS Windows has lost 400million machines in 3 years. So who are all these people so left behind that DDR3 is an upgrade but are still currently itching to buy ram? I don’t get it.
I never left DDR3. Still never upgraded from an FX-8350.
Sure, you can do that. You might as well be gaming on a Steam Deck though, because that’s the level of CPU you’d be limited to.
Which is fine, I’ve got a Legion Go S, it works fine as long as you’re aware of the limitations.
But if I want the AAA big screen shiz, I’m loading up something on my PS5.
I had 96 GB DDR3 for sale and no one even looked at the ad. $20.
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 👍
You’ve gotta daaance all your troubles awayyy…
NnTssNnTssNnTss…I think that weird kibble might be kicking in
My pc uses DDR2 and it runs Linux with no problem. I can even game, just not the new ones
