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RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously!
(hackaday.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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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.
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.
like this is anecdotal but most of my family has PC's that are getting a bit long in the tooth but they still use it just fine for all the basic internet shit they do. Alot of folks would rather check their banking or emails on a bigger screen. My mom's computer for example is almost 10 years old, if I throw Linux on it she's good till the thing just up and dies.
She asked about buying a new PC this year and I just laughed and said "no, you enjoy having a roof over your head right?"
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).
You have a small sever as a daily driver
Small?