Here I was thinking they were recommending a game that ran well with low RAM or something. Like WTF is Dead Dead Redemption 3?
I had 96 GB DDR3 for sale and no one even looked at the ad. $20.
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…
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 write this post from a Core2Quad machine with 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and a spinning harddisk… and the system feels quiet fast and nimble.
Add a cheap 120GB SSD alongside the HD and it’ll give it whole new lease of life.
Nah… i don’t trust SSD’s, had too many dying over the years without any form of warning.
SandForce controller?
I’ve never had a newer SSD fail on me. knocks wood I’ve got 3 in my computer, all the spinny-spinny-crashies are gone.
Anyway, the idea behind the cheap small SSD is that you only put your OS and generic software on it, not your photos and personal data that you can’t afford to lose.
Did an AI write this?
Feels like it, but my gut feeling is “no” due to missing commas and no space before the em dash. Just a poorly written article.
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’ve got a PC with an i7-4770k, 32GB of RAM, and RTX 3090 that plays games just fine (and does runs local LLMs just fine too).
Forget the RAM, don’t you get CPU limited?
Every game I’ve tried works fine. Including resource hungry games like Cyberpunk 2077. It’s my understanding that games are typically light on the CPU because they typically also try to target consoles which don’t have very good CPUs. It is noticeably slower at some (highly parallelize-able) tasks, but is fine for any game I’ve tried. The CPU is probably roughly equivalent to the CPU in a Steam Deck.
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.
I was going to say I play Factorio which is fairly new until I looked up when it entered early access… :/
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…
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!”
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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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.
