DDr3 works well with Linux (and older Windows OS) for many applications. Just don’t play games, and don’t use AI for a while - you’ll be smooth sailing for a few years before prices fall. Use other devices instead - phones/tablets.
I hadn’t actually looked up any numbers on the RAM shortage. Less than a year ago I got 2 8GB sticks of no-name PC3200 DDR4 for less than $25. I didn’t even really need it for my use-case, but it was so cheap that “why not” felt like a perfectly viable reason to upgrade to 32GB total. Six years ago I got the original two-pack of 8GB sticks for $75. Now that same amount of old-ass DDR4 would be $90-$100. Jeezus. No upgrades for me for a while.
Im still on ddr3 and an amd fx. I can play every game except Alan wake 2.
I dont play most aaa slop though.
I play too much path of exile for that to be acceptable sadly
The sheer glut of load zones means even a spinning disk is unacceptable. I literally saved over an hour in time over a weekend back in the day going from ddr3 to 4, and three hours over a weekend going from a spinning disk to a solid state.
And the games only gotten larger in the last few years…
Ddr3 is great! Till you have to deal with a lot of load zones. ):
You gotta get on Alan Wake 2. I’ve been having a great time playing it. Play the first and Control before you do and you’ll see a lot of tie-ins which is pretty fun. One of the characters looks a lot like Max Payne too.
You gotta get on Alan Wake 2.
Bit cruel after they just said they can’t run it 😄
I have played both previous alan wakes and control! Great games. I need to play quantum break next.
Okay good! I played Control years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked it back up from the beginning a number of months back and got hooked. I had a price watch on Alan Wake 2 from a couple years ago and it finally hit my target so I got it. I figured I should play through the first Alan Wake so I played it and enjoyed it significantly more than I thought I would. Now I’m probably a quarter of the way through 2 and I’m really liking it a lot. I definitely want to check out Quantum Break also.
There’s a lot of AAA that isn’t slop. That sounds like coping.
Would you be able to run something like Horizon Forbidden West at moderate settings and 60 fps?
Thinking the avg lemmy user plays games that are newer then 2008 is were you fucked up.
People that use this platform basically are glorified luddites when it comes to gaming unless you go to extremely specific gaming areas. Then it’s like 2018 instead of 2008.
Don’t even know of that game.
I dont really stay up to date on super new games either tbh. I have a huge console collection so a lot of my gaming is spent there as well. Besides, I dont pay more than 20 dollars for games, so I dont buy new ones.
Also, since I refuse to run windows, quite a few scummy game companies are purposely locking out linux users with their trash anti cheat. So I wont play those games and have no want to.
Oh also I just looked up that game. I cant stand that kind of game so I would never feel the need to play it. Too much fantasy and flashiness for me. Wayy too complex to be fun for people who dont game 12 hours a day.
super new games
I dont pay more than 20 dollars
I paid €16 for Horizon Zero Dawn, it came out in 2017… 🤷♂️ One of the best single player games I’ve ever played. Runs on Linux. Played the whole game on Linux. Played in sessions of a few hours a time. I have 2 kids and played this game.
I think you are using a lot of assumptions here. But if you really don’t like that kind of game, fair enough.
I’m just saying, there are a lot of high value games which are not slop. All I’m saying.
some people (…) are asking “can you game on DDR3“? The answer is a shocking yes.
“shocking”. Really?
Browsing the internet as a third worlder always give me these eye-rolling moments. Sigh…
Checking the year of manufacture of my daily driver laptop… 2018. It’s fine, it works well, does everything I need, just like it did 8 years ago when it was an “average” new laptop.
Oh, it’s also running Linux, I don’t know what would have happened if I left Windows on it - that got dumped in 2018 too.
Everything’s shocking, under-rated and or being blasted these days.
You really slammed em with that one
Prepare for the EVISCERATION
REJECTED
It’s all just one big ass blast.
SMASH LIKE
“Can’t compete with the global super rich? Lower your standards and be happy!”
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 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.
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
This is how existence works, yes. Being happy means adjusting your wants to what you have.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Some enterprising teenager should offer to upgrade peoples PCs to Linux, especially as Windows 11 is pushed harder. They could even offer a tech support option for a yearly fee.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can confirm, I recently maxed out the RAM on my decade-old rig at 32GB. At least the used DDR3 RAM was cheap. With motherboards that old you are limited to processors like Intel Haswell with 4 cores, pretty anemic by today’s standards.
It works just fine for me running Linux and doing minimal gaming. 90% of my gaming these days is on the SteamDeck anyway.
I thought as I got older I would have more money to buy current gen PC parts and build basically whatever I wanted. Turns out priorities just shifted and things got even more expensive.
Its been good for my homelab
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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.
Hope I’m not stupid for saying this but I haven’t been able to tell the difference between DDR3 and DDR4
Yep, it works fine for my day to day stuff. And runs many games just fine. I still run my Ivy Bridge Xeon CPU (bought for cheap years ago). Pair a X79 chipset, Xeon with quad channel memory, and say an Arc A770. You can do many modern tasks and games just fine. And for cheap.
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.
Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.
Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3
Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.
Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3
I’ve noticed my ram speed much less than the amount of ram for quite some time.
SSDs were game changers.
My mom and dad both have ancient machines at home and I swapped both to SATA SSDs. The improvement was incredible. They went from basically unusable, in my opinion, to completely functional for anything they would be doing.
The question is for companies like Ubisoft and EA which usually design games for what PCs are going to be when a game comes out. And since the games industry was bigger than the movies industry before it collapsed due to Covid, what’s that going to do to the economy?
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.
I’m already considering building a maxed out AMD based machine, with DDR3.
The last machine I had with that technology lasted me 12 years. I can vouch for it.
I trust DDR3 to last decades.
DDR5? I’ve had three different sticks, from different brands, on different boards, die on me because of this stupid idea of adding the power delivery circuit in the RAM stick itself. So RAM manufacturers cheap out or don’t pay enough attention and your stick die, meanwhile, motherboard manufacturers have been dealing with multiple sensitive voltage rails for decades and have more than enough experience keeping them working.
How very strange. I manage a deployment of hundreds of ddr5 based systems and have had no issues with failing ram. Not a single one.
I have seen multiple consumer am5 motherboards with poor bios that fail to recognize ram and we’ve definitely seen stories of atypical processor failure rates in a handful of am5 boards by a couple of manufacturers. All of these things point to declining investment in motherboard design and testing by a couple of consumer motherboard brands rather than issues with modern silicon.
The dead power management issue was more prevalent on the first generation of DDR5 sticks leaving the factories, sometimes with certain motherboard vendors (like Gigabyte) making the issue worse by using very aggressive “auto tuning” during memory training that never was quite within spec.
I moved to a DDR4/AM4 platform when I assembled my current machine because the AM3 platform was being labelled as end of cycle and the FM segment seemed too niche.
The scales tiped when I discovered many AM4 CPUs carried on chip graphic processing capabilities and being in need of a graphics card it was more affordable for me to just buy an APU than buy a CPU and add a GPU on top.
Not being a gamer and a Linux user, throwing money on a graphics card, that by then were heavily price inflated, made little sense, so I opted by the AM4 platform.
Currently, I’m considering building a machine capable of running Wasteland 2, because that game has been under my eye for years.
I’m finding graphic cards with 4GB of memory on the market with very interesting prices. Used CPUs are cheap, unless I aim for the top tier models, with 6 or more cores. I still have the memory chips from the machine I retired (8GB) and getting an additional 8 is nothing out of reach. I just need to find a motherboard that can take 16GB or more of memory.
If I can assemble a machine capable of running that game, I’m fairly confident the system itself will be more than enough to comply with my daily computing needs and then some.
a machine capable of running Wasteland 2
Is there even such a machine on God’s good earth? It’s definitely a good game, but absolutely blighted by instability & CTDs last time I tried it a few years ago.
Don’t know. But thank you for the warning.
GOG sent an email the other day warning the game was on discount and after taking another look at hardware the requirements it felt like a good benchmark for the technology of the time.
It was heavy back then.
Really? I’ve been managing a fleet of PCs at work with DDR5 for a few years now and haven’t noticed any memory issues.
A couple motherboard and PSU replacements, but no memory failures.
I had an 8350 machine with 32gb of ram when if was in season and while it never really left me short of power, the intel 4770k and 4790k were better performers. That may not be the case anymore with stuff being more multi-core optimized but at the time, the intel single core performance was so much better than the 8350s which made a bid difference in gaming.
My old rig was an 8350 overclocked to 4.5 on liquid, crossfired 3gb 7950hd’s, and 32gb of matched corsair dominator ddr3 all in a corsair 230t chassis with the bright orange paint and led fans.
There’s so many good games made per year now it’s impossible to play them all so buckle up and start playing some older titles. I got into the Witcher 3 6 or 7 years after release and was blown away how I slept on that.
I’m about to go dumpster diving for ram or some shit, holy fuck the prices are fucked
I never left DDR3. Still never upgraded from an FX-8350.
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.
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.
