RAM prices are so brutal that Intel and AMD are reviving decade-old DDR4
Decade-old RAM is making a comeback
With DDR5 kits now costing more than double their DDR4 equivalents, Intel and AMD are bringing back support for the older memory. Gigabyte says new LGA 1700 CPUs will arrive in early 2027, while AMD's AM4 platform gets fresh motherboards and a Ryzen 7 5800X3D relaunch. DDR4 launched in 2014, but the shortage has made hanging onto it a smart move.
Under normal circumstances, buying new hardware to use technology that's over a decade old would probably be a bad investment. But the RAM shortage is changing the math.
- Kevin_Flynn
My AI model queried itself just this morning to verify cluster status, and it says although DDR5 has been available since 2020, that 2+2 is still equal to 4 for those of us still running DDR4. V
In all seriousness, anyone remember when every library, business, government agency, and institution, etc was buying $20,000 cisco routers to "get on the internet" during the dot com boom/bust in the late 90's ?
Only to see them all end up on the surplus market, unused, for a couple hundred ?
We're in the AI boom/bust cycle, and its my understanding DRAM fab is specialized enough, that the supply is getting squeezed.
As for "doing it on purpose" ? It's being milked for all its worth. That's what companies do. They milk the market for what it will pay.
- wmchen
Adjadent to the article, there are some interesting builds with pulled parts from decommissioned servers in places where hardware is expensive or heavily taxed.
There's an entire parallel ecosystem around Chinese X79 and X99 boards [1](brands like Huananzhi and Machinist). They exist almost entirely to soak up scrap-tier Xeons and decommissioned server DDR3 and DDR4 ECC RAM that get pulled from datacenters for next to nothing. You see them online in Russian/Chinese/SE Asian online communities as budget builds, so nearly all the BIOS mods and documentation are in Russian or Chinese.
I think in NA we'd tend to write this hardware off as e-waste unless you're a homelabber (though I know Kimsufi still includes DDR3 builds in their catalogue). But in emerging markets, people have been squeezing real utility out of discarded enterprise silicon for a long time out of pure economic necessity. I've been tempted to do my own build but I already seek to have collected an overwhelmingly unnecessary amount of 2012-era workstations that I'm not sure my partner would appreciate an addition to.
- dspillett
Hmm. That might push me further towards just decomissioning this machine and using the laptop with a dock instead of rebuilding with Linux. The 64Gb of DDR4 in it might be worth a fair bit second-hand more than I assumed. I'll have to scan my box of old parts too, I'm sure there is some DDR4 in there (or maybe that is old enough to be DDR3…).
- Kuyawa
I firmly believe this shortage is artificially produced and I really hope chinese manufacturers flood the market and make memory as cheap as toilet paper
- mrob
I'm posting from a machine with 8GiB of DDR3-1333. The modern web is slow, but I avoid the modern web as much as possible anyway. The software I actually enjoy using is mostly fast enough. Swap on zram (LZ4 compression, vm.page-cluster = 0, earlyoom userspace OOM killer, no disk swap) makes it feel like 9GiB with no perceptible downside.
- Havoc
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.
- theturtletalks
This mentions DDR4, but I used to be in electronic recycling and I have still so much 1GB and 2GB DDR2 and DDR3 RAM. Happy to ship a couple of sticks if you guys could find a use. It’s going to scrap otherwise.
- Sesse__
A friend and I bought RAM for our aging servers at eBay in 2024. That was 512GB (16x32GB -- we split it equally) of DDR4 ECC 2133MHz, registered. For… $536.86 plus shipping.
Somehow it feels like we got a pretty good deal, in retrospect. (My server has been since replaced, and I can tell you, 256GB of DDR5 ECC was more than that! There's been a further doubling or two of prices since I bought, though. I think I could maybe sell half the RAM and finance the entire server…)