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.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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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?
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
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"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.
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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?
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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