DDR3 is DEAD

With how expensive gaming PCs have gotten, I wanted to take a look at DDR3 and see if even though it's well past it's end of life, if it's still a good idea to build a DDR3 gaming system.

Some of the following product links are affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

Workstations (affiliate)

GPU used (affiliate)

CPUs used (affiliate)

My Gear (Affiliate)

[megatronskneecap]

DDR3 is basically still supported as the majority of the cheap windows machines use "low powered" DDR4 which is just extremley slow DDR3.

[bariumlanthanum]

Until early 2023, I was rocking a Dell Precision workstation with an x79 quad-core Xeon, GTX Titan X 12GB, 24 gigs of DDR3, and a 2x4TB 7200RPM HDD in Raid 0.
It was an absolute beast considering its old age.

However, in late January of 2023, my work gave me (and let me keep) a new Dell Precision mobile workstation, with a 14-core 12900HK, 64GB DDR5, RTX A4000, and 2TB NVMe SSD.

The DDR3 system, hand-down from my dad, served me well throughout its life as my main PC, and is still my NAS now.

[callum]

For the longest time I was running a dual Xeon server motherboard as my desktop. had a pair of 2650v2s and 192gb(24x8) of DDR3 ECC memory in a supermicro motherboard. It was by far the cheapest way to build a workstation with the memory capacity I needed for data science. The whole system cost $400 and was built from salvaged parts or liquidation auctions.

[StefanHolmes]

Fiancée was using a Haswell i5 4460 with RX580 until very recently. RDR2 ran fine.

She has upgraded to an 5800X3D and 6650XT now and RDR2 still runs fine, but now with all the details set to highest.

Pro tip for anyone with an AMD FX system: Set your Windows power profile to High Performance. This used to make a huge difference back when I had my 8150 and 1070Ti.

[AliceC]

Having recently upgraded from an i5-3570K, I put my current 6700 XT on it just out of curiosity. Honestly... not as bad as I was expecting. 100% CPU usage was frequent, but it handled itself well considering its age. Framerates/times weren't terrible, either.

[HenrySomeone]

All the way from 2014 to 2020, huh? I've been "rocking" ddr2 all the way since 2006.

[jmtradbr]

I have a friend who still daily drive a 8gb DDR2 PC with a RX 580 8gb.

[LeKingCarnage]

I'm still on my 4790k. I'll probably upgrade in a year or two but my system lasting 8 years is pretty impressive.

[cleengreeny]

One of the reasons that the 6600 seemed like it was at 100% on the AM3 system is that AM3 used PCIE 2.0 X16, whereas the 6600 runs PCIE 4.0 X8, so you can’t use the full bandwidth of the slot anyway, but it also gets bottlenecks by the older standard.

[ProtoFalcon]

I finally went from DDR3R to DDR4 when I built a Ryzen Hackintosh, and repurposed my Early 2009 Mac Pro, as a home server after generally being on DDR3, since 2009. Honestly, even these old LGA1366 systems—Mac or PC—are still very useful—especially when upgraded with NVMe SSDs.

Also DDR3R is next to WORTHLESS per GB; Already upgraded two different Mac Pro 4, 1 units to 192GB (6x32GB) RAM after getting full 256GB kits for around $80 each (and while I can utilize all 256GB, 192GB is MUCH faster due to triple-channel).

[mr.electronx]

Delided 4790k, with liquid metal runs at 5Ghz all cores.
Using it with DDR3 2133Mhz with GTX 1080ti as my second rig.

[Euzebius]

In Brazil everything is very expensive, so I continue with my I7 3770K and DDR3 memories

[Jtretta]

One thing that would make the x79 build a fair bit better in the productivity tests would be if you had 4 sticks of ram in it instead of 2, as one of the big selling points for the LGA2011 socket was the quad-channel ram.

[michaelheath]

I built my DDR3 system back in late 2015 and am still using it today. I started out with 8GBs of corsair vengeance ram clocked at 1333MHz which was later upgraded to 16GBs a couple of years later. I'm still running an I5-4690K and an EVGA GTX 970. I plan on upgrading soon as I have a 1440p monitor and am not willing to lower the graphics or resolution of the games I play. I also plan on getting into game development, 3D modeling, and video editing which all require me to make some hardware changes.

[Chaos_God_of_Fate]

My DDR3 is alive and still doing great. Not dead. Still running a 4.8ghz 4790k/5700xt/2133 CL9 - very well balanced system, GPUbusy is perfectly synced in all my games- no bottlenecks, maybe even a tiny bit of headroom.

These sorts of systems make for great cheap 4k gaming rigs. It's not practical but if you wanted to at 4k you can pair a 4790k (or similar like 2011 Xeon you tested) with a 4080 or 4090 and get minimum bottlenecking- even with raytracing turned on. There are many videos about it on here on YT, CPUs become almost insignificant at very high resolutions.

[RohitCantSing]

You'd be surprised by the amount of ddr3 pc still being built . That too with 4th gen processors at most and 4GB Ram. They're pretty much every guy's first gaming pc AND permanent pcs in small businesses.
Not to mention core 2duo lga775 with 2gb ddr2 Ram.

[shrrpplys]

Im still rocking my old buldozer

Asus ROG Crosshair V Formula - Z
AMD FX 8350 8 core OC to 4.4Ghz
Asus ROG Strix RX 570 4GB Gaming OC to 1314Mhz
4x4 Corsair 1600Mhz 16GB DDR3
AMD Wraith Prism RGB cooler

[aren]

the only reason im keeping my ddr3 cuz if i switch, I would need to buy a new mobo, cpu, and ram and im not doing that

[HenrySomeone]

Also, if you want the newest platform with ddr3, there were some Z170 boards using it, meaning you can theoretically go as high as 7700K.

[mecyanned]

I used ddr3 from 2015 to 2023. It was an i7 5500u nvidia 920m. It was good until 2021

Now I have a ryzen 5 4600h gtx 1650.