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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

Depending on your location and power costs though, before the recent crises, it was probably generally worth it get newer hardware for the power efficiency gains. I have an old DDR3 dual-socket XEON E5-2650 system, and while it's more than sufficient for everything I run on it (and then some), its idle power consumption is pretty bad. If prices do ever come down, I'll probably try to replace it purely for that reason, even though I'm not sure I'll ever need more raw horsepower than it's got.

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

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

Apparently mainly CPU (rather than GPU) limited games tend to benefit from DDR5: https://www.techspot.com/review/3059-ddr5-vs-ddr4-gaming/

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

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.

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.

I actually recently bought DDR3 memory: $150 for 32GB for an older computer. The price is so much cheaper than what I expected. (My expectation of current RAM price is probably pretty out of whack due to market conditions.)

You were ripped hard. $150 is 32GB of 2133/2400 DDR4. DDR3 should be like $50 for 2x16GB set.

Sorry.

There’s no consumer-grade 16GB DDR3. 4x8GB is what’s needed. I could believe one year ago 4x8GB DDR3 would have cost $50 though.

Just checked, 8GB DDR3 1600 is around $15 on a local market and $30-50 in retail.

EDIT: and $120 for the Kingston ones, albeit LP variant.

Actually, because it is absolute fine DDR4 prices are also rising. The only thing I found I could find for a decent price is unbuffered server ram or laptop ram.

I think the reason why those processors are produced are because it rather makes sense to upgrade your old rig with them. Seems to be the only way actually to increase CPU sales beyond laptops ans smart phones.

I don't see more DDR4 ram being produced. Chinese brands are already starting to produce DDR5 and soon HBM. 'Bringing back DDR4' is IMHO a too bold claim.

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