Was expecting the article to go deep into DDR3 land by tone of the title...

Something like 3200mhz DDR4 is still perfectly fine for 90% of consumer use. You really don't need more to look at cat pictures on facebook.

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walrus01 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The article doesn't go into detail about it, but if you go to eBay and find a really old Dell rack server that that does use DDR3 ECC Registered (such as an R910 or R920 with 512GB in it), they have significantly gained in value over the past 12-18 months. Or like an R720 with 256 or 512GB in it. Also major price jump in resale value. That's what we have come to now.

	▲	TacticalCoder an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but TBH an old server with DDR3 ECC is still way sufficient to serve something like 99.9% of all the servers out there's jobs. That's the plain truth: most sites/servers simply serve very very very little and have not anywhere near the need for 256 GB of RAM, let alone 512 GB. These old servers aren't sufficient for the Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Meta/Google/Oracle of this world, but for 99.9% of the rest of the world, they're more than plenty. And the world and technology shall keep on marching: we'll have DDR6 and as soon as that happens, suddenly all the hyperscalers shall consider DDR5 to be oh-so-lame and dumped by the truckloads in landfills. We may have two more painful years ahead for RAM but we'll then have plenty of used enterprise/datacenters gear on the market.

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Tade0 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My old laptop has this exact RAM. Funny thing is that in terms of throughput it's on par with my current one, where I put just one 32GB stick, with one slot left for upgrades.

I still use it occasionally and it's really the old CPU and worn out SSD which slow it down.

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cubefox 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That 90% probably also includes computer games. I'm not sure whether those need fast main memory. They certainly need fast VRAM.

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dgellow 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most games do not, unless you want the best graphics. But then you’re out of the 90% use cases

	▲	cubefox 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Apparently mainly CPU (rather than GPU) limited games tend to benefit from DDR5: https://www.techspot.com/review/3059-ddr5-vs-ddr4-gaming/

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PunchyHamster 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DDR4 have similar latency as DDR5 and that's what matters in all games, while raw bandwidth only matters in some games

	▲	jacquesm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And raw bandwidth is a function of how many channels you've got as well. So a threadripper with 8 channels of DDR4 will run just fine even on heavy workloads.