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Comment by tus88 | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else holding on to their years old PC waiting for ddr5 to come out before upgrading?

Depends what you're doing with it. Newer memory is usually very expensive when it first comes out, to the point that you can often get better performance by spending the same money on a system with the older memory and higher end other components. It's only really worth waiting if your workload is sufficiently memory bound (and most of them aren't).

And, of course, if you're the sort who values performance over money then you buy a new one now and when the new memory comes out.

I suppose I could also argue if you value money over performance you would not upgrade at all. That's me right now.

I guess I am one of those people who absolutely hates the idea of swapping out the ram, motherboard and cpu just for a mid life upgrade. I would actually rather pay more to jump in at the beginning of a new era knowing I will be able to upgrade to a new cpu in 3 years time without upgrading everything else at the same time.

If you want the mid life upgrade you can always build for it on purpose. A second gen Ryzen 5 is presumably a noticeable improvement over whatever DDR3 quad core it would be replacing, but then you get to upgrade it to a third or fourth gen Ryzen 9 later when the price comes down.

That's one of the cheapest ways to stay semi-current, e.g. a Ryzen 5 2600 is $135 today on Newegg, add motherboard and 16GB memory and it's a little over $250. Then another $250 in three years for the Ryzen 9 from today, and the DDR5 version of the Ryzen 5 system three years after that. Much cheaper than buying the new thing the day it comes out (but also never as fast).

I was considering it but the prices on RAM have dropped a bit recently and my DDR3 was leaving a lot to be desired. Pulled the trigger and got 32GB of 3200Mhz of DDR4. I got 6 years out of my prior build, I'm sure my new build will last the same if not longer.

I have a fx6300 with 24gb ddr3 and a 1070ti and win10 and I am quite happy with it still.

There's so much cache on modern CPUs that memory performance matters a lot less than you'd think.

The best time to upgrade would be to get a previous generation CPU and mainboard when ddr5 comes out. Prices for the 1 year old stuff will drop hard because no one wants ddr4 ram anymore, including mainboards and CPUS. You could probably easily afford 32GB of RAM or more that way.

My desktop was built in 2013 and I feel it has another 4-5 years left before I upgrade. I used the best parts at the time and they are still more than enough for my usage.

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