"Can't compete with the global super rich? Lower your standards and be happy!"
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Just because they've trained you to believe you need the latest 2nm chips (which is conveniently their highest margin product) doesn't mean you really need them.
So personal computers of year 1999 gave their users that feeling of magic that can still be felt from media of that time, and state-of-the-art chips were being produced in fabs located not only on Taiwan, but USA, Israel, elsewhere.
Personal computers of today don't give any feeling of magic to most their users, you have to look for it.
Yet considering a standard still above what you realistically need is somehow lowering your standards.
In year 2006 they'd say about computers how many books you can fit into this or that volume of memory, or which calculations you can perform, sometimes, to give you perspective. They don't do that now, because then you'd be depressed how many resources you are using for something more vulgar than porn.
It's just sad.
For most people, computers became powerful enough around the year 2005. A machine from late in the Windows XP era could run 3D games, CAD software, edit video, communicate with the entire world through broadband internet. What abilities have PCs taken on since? So much processing power filled up by doing the same tasks less efficiently for no reason.
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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.”
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?
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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
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...
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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’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.
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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?"
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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.
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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?
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).
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Im still on ddr3 and an amd fx. I can play every game except Alan wake 2.
I dont play most aaa slop though.
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My take : Prices got you down ? Keep the hardware you already have ! No one else can upgrade anyway, games requirements aren't going up anytime soon.
Obviously that doesn't cover you if you don't already have a machine, in which case I would go DDR3.
But for those who do, does anyone upgrade anymore ? I'm on 2019 hardware and everything runs perfectly good. Oftentimes great !
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I'm already considering building a maxed out AMD based machine, with DDR3.
The last machine I had with that technology lasted me 12 years. I can vouch for it.
I trust DDR3 to last decades.
DDR5? I've had three different sticks, from different brands, on different boards, die on me because of this stupid idea of adding the power delivery circuit in the RAM stick itself. So RAM manufacturers cheap out or don't pay enough attention and your stick die, meanwhile, motherboard manufacturers have been dealing with multiple sensitive voltage rails for decades and have more than enough experience keeping them working.
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There's so many good games made per year now it's impossible to play them all so buckle up and start playing some older titles. I got into the Witcher 3 6 or 7 years after release and was blown away how I slept on that.
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.
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...
I bought an 8G ECC RDIMM DDR4 the other day for 15 bucks cash.
Guy around my age who "bought the wrong kind" for his laptop, and forgot about it until it was too late to return it.
I'm gonna hold onto it a little longer, then see if I can't make 30 or 40 bucks off it. 🤣
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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?
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.
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I’m about to go dumpster diving for ram or some shit, holy fuck the prices are fucked
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.
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But why did my millenial heart immediately think of Dance Dance Revolution???
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.
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Here I was thinking they were recommending a game that ran well with low RAM or something. Like WTF is Dead Dead Redemption 3?
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