DDR3 seemed plenty fast when it first showed up 19 years ago. Who could say no to 6400 Mb/s transfer speeds? Of course compared to the modern DDR5 that’s glacially slow, but given that RAM is worth its weight in gold these days– with even DDR4 spiking in price– some people, like [Gheeotine], are asking “can you game on DDR3“? The answer is a shocking yes.
[Gheeotine] builds two budget-friendly PCs for this video, using some of the newest DD3-supporting motherboards available. That’s not exactly new: we’re talking 12 to 15 years old, but hey, not old enough to drive. We certainly didn’t expect to hear about an x79 motherboard hosting an Ivy Bridge processor in 2026, but needs must when the devil dances. The only concession to modernity is the graphics cards: the x79 mobo got an RX6600XT 8GB, and the other build, using a z97 motherboard got an NVIDIA RTX 4060. The z97 motherboard allowed a slightly newer processor, as well, an i7 4790, with the new and exciting Haswell architecture you may have heard of. Both boards are maxed out on RAM, because at less than one USD/GB, why not?
[Gheeotine] puts a few new titles through their paces on these boxen, and while the results aren’t amazing, everything he tries comes out playable, which is amazing in and of itself. Well, playable unless you’re one of those people who can’t stand playing at resolutions under 4K or FPS under 100. Those of who spent their formative years with 29.7 FPS or 25 FPS in NTSC or PAL regions aren’t going to complain too loudly if frame rates dip down into the 30s playing at 1080p for some of the more demanding titles. Ironically, one of those was the five-year-old Crysis Remastered. Given the age of some of this hardware “Can it Run Crysis” is a perfectly reasonable question, and the answer is still yes.
If you want modern games, you’re much better off with a z97 chipset motherboard if you chose to go the DDR3 route, since you won’t run into issues related to the AVX2 instruction, which first appeared with the Haswell microarchitecture. Here at Hackaday our preferred solution to the rampocalypse is software optimization, Since holding your breath for that would probably be fatal, cost-optimizing PC builds is probably a good plan, even if some might balk at going all the way back to DDR3.
Of course if you’re going to use nearly-retro hardware like DDR3, you might as well go all-out on retro vibes with a nostalgic 80s-style, or even 50s-style case.
Better yet, grow up and get rid of the “gaming” habit. By not engaging in this collosal waste of time you’re doing your part in starving The Game Industry.
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I don’t care about games, but I do use DDR3, and this even before prices went crazy : mostly because we need servers with lot of RAM (total of several TB), and both DDR3-era servers and DDR3 ECC modules are dirty-cheap, around 0.5~0.6 €/GB. Or at least were until recently !
Not anymore unfortunately. :/
You could do much better than ivybridge. Even broadwell supported DDR3, with much higher clocks. You can also supposedly run DDR3L on some skylake boards, thought reports are that running DDR3 (non-L) will overvolt the CPU’s memory controller.
Kaby Lake CPUs for LGA1151 also support DDR3L.
But apparently nobody ever built a 200 series motherboard with DDR3(L) slots. You’d have to use a 100 series board with a recent BIOS.
“recent” is the wrong word. You need a later version.
Use Coffeetime utility to patch the BIOS and inject newer microcode for the CoffeeLake CPUs. Sometimes add a jumper for CPU presence detection.
Can try to run Coffee Lake on DDR3 if you like. I have seen an OEM Dell desktop with a 6600 and DDR3, made me double-take.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8ne49t/intel_8th_generation_ddr3_support/
Biostar Gaming Z170T is a motherboard that might support modifications to 8th gen CPU.
Modified BGA 1440 laptop CPUs may work well as I have had an official Lenovo laptop with “10th” gen CPU with LPDDR3 memory, was kinda cool, Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th gen? Not sure. Wound up swapping parts around with an 8th gen and sold both.
You are right. According to Wikipedia Coffee Lake supports DDR3 when using the H310 chipset. The Biostar H310MHD3 and Gigabyte H310M DS2V DDR3 have DDR3(L) slots and support up to Coffee Lake Refresh (e.g. i9-9900K).
This doesn’t surprise me because my gaming PC still has an older mainboard with DDR3, and in terms of gaming performance the memory speed doesn’t seem to have inconvenienced it in the slightest. Even runs Assetto Corsa with the usual modern graphical mods at 4K resolution around 60fps.
Ram too expensive? Just buy F150.
Last time I saw somebody do that it was an attempt to keep bicycle riders off of a trail in the woods. Never invoke what thou canst not banish.
You can’t Dodge RAM prices.
Hello brother.
Do you see that parachute cord across the trail at neck height?
No, you don’t.
Neck height for tour de frog larpers is low, they’re in tuck coming down the hill.
Mountain bikers shouldn’t be hurt too bad.
Just wait a little for AI bubble burst and get RAM for free.
Or try RAID memory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR6ag8M68nk
There are some modern-ish SBCs like the Zimablade using old DDR3L/similar. I wonder if they’ll sell out, too, as we try to scavenge everything left of value from the marketplace.
It’s a good time for experimental or mechanical RAM. Luckily, MCU prices have not budged much; not much AI demand for 400kB modules.
(I think some of these prices, especially in stock market, might be more bubble than “economics”; I don’t see why Intel stock should rise due to RAM becoming unaffordable; you would not look at tires becoming unaffordable and adding high cost to vehicles and think it’s a good time to buy a chassis manufacturer. It wasn’t too long ago we went through consumer panic cycles during covid, and it seems notable manufacturers are frequently hyping a forecast for a long-term shortage — make sure to buy everything you can!)
A month ago I upgraded my Z87/i7 4790 32GB to a Z790/i7 14700 32GB DDR5 due to a dead motherboard. Bitter pill as the RAM was the most expensive part.
Not exactly overwhelmed by the performance of the new system but at least it runs W11 without fuzz.
I could have lived with the old system a few years still.
Debloat Win11. The hold back in Win11 is it downloads ads from the Internet before opening the start menu. If the internet latency is your bottleneck no amount of CPU Ghz will help you.
Unless you stress test all 20 cores with a cooler capable of 200-250watt heat dissipation you might not notice much difference. Great gains can be had tuning the RAM.
The 14700 I tested with a 7-pipe Thermalright Phantom Spirit (A $35-45 cooler) would heat throttle over 200watts, but it was pulling a ~ 24 second BMW Blender render all CPU. Which is pretty impressive. Again, only if you need the multi-core performance. You might notice snappier performance disabling all the E cores if you use older software that doesn’t get pinned to P cores.
For comparison I see someone with a 3950x got a 1:46 CPU render of the Blender BMW, a 5900x user got around a 3 minute render time.
My 14700 results were at about 210-220w, and you need a serious cooler to keep it from throttling, recommend either 140mm Noctua Air cooler or a decent 360mm AIO (not just a bling RGB one with a weak pump and head.)
Might be worth trying to revive the old motherboard with a CH341A, I buy a few of the Z87/Z97 and the best part is a +400mhz EFI mod to the bios and all-core turbo for locked CPUs. This works even on Xeon 1241v3 for example and nets 3900 or 4000 all core. Obviously if you had the i7 already it’s not necessary.
I was rocking an i5-2500k gtx970 with 4x4GB DDR3 1866 up until about 6 years ago. Everything was totally playable.
I’ll keep running my 5800X3D a few more years with mediocre DDR4 3600 C18 thankfully X3D chips don’t really care about CAS latency.
That’s my strategy BTW. But I am using my gaming PC from 2019 (Ryzen 7 3700X, RX5700, 32 GiB RAM) that still can move all new releases at 1080p 60+ FPS unless you want raytracing (but I can live without it).
In fairness I got Perma-banned from Reddit in early 2025 for telling everyone to build an AM5 system.
Late 2024 and early 2025 sticks of Kllisre 16GB were going for $25 each on eBay and I was ordering Ryzen 7700 CPUs for $141-$180 from AliExpress. I even bought 64GB DDR5 for a friend’s build for $105.
Today I’m waiting for my $20/pair DDR5 SODIMM adapters to put some 4800 laptop sticks in a $32 B650 motherboard with an 8400F I nabbed off Jawa for $99 total after making an offer and using ‘WELCOME10’ coupon. Motherboard was a bent pin special, only 1 RAM channel is working. I’ve got a 2070 with the BGA detaching (if it boots it might only be on x1 PCIe lanes), or a Radeon 5500 Pro 8GB. Either one should run my game, Roadcraft, just fine. Also have a 3080 Mobile 16GB in a Clevo with a desktop i7 9700F CPU. Could run it but the fan is a terrible noise and Nvidia disabled all TDP down controls :(. Maybe I’ll give it a shot with an older driver again, or switch the fans to an arduino or Oi Zero for PWM control.
I guess I looked like an advertising spambot to Reddit. Although it’s possible I was against the service terms by offering to fix people’s computers, I think I did wind up repairing a single laptop 🤷🏼♂️
I’ve always had the impression that RAM size is much, much more important than RAM speed. So DDR3 still being usable is only logical to me. Unfortunately, 4GB sticks of DDR3 are quite rare. All of my DDR3 systems have 8Gigs max with 4 sticks.
You are half correct, actually Latency is more important than speed.
I think what most think of as ‘speed’ is actually theoretical maximum transfer, which would usually be sequential, like loading video frames or large data sets.
What may be slowing an application is latency, that is why V-Cache in an AMD X3D chip can show a marked improvement on video game smoothness. Less cache misses going out to system memory.
DDR5 has dual separately addressed 32-bit channels per DIMM, this improves latency as you could read or write to different parts as needed, not having to wait until the current operation completes to fetch data you needed.
DDR4 (and maybe 3?) is available in dual rank, which depending on the memory controller can see latency improvements as it can be independent to some degree. Running CPU-Z benchmark on DDR4 1rx8 2666 I would beat the score every time using 2rx8 2400. If the module has 16 chips that is dual rank. 4 or 8 chips is single rank.
I have a Lenovo laptop running some Ripjaws DDR3 2133 RAM, and the latency is better still than DDR4. I think I had the Intel 3rd gen dual core running the game Grid at 40FPS on the iGPU, not bad. XD
i kind of want to see performance matched cpu and dram on the same package. appease the ghost of grace hopper as you dont have to go off package to fetch memory. just the next chiplet over. this is how socs get more performance out of the same chips and would like to see this in performance computing. also mismatched ram/cpu is a source of bottlenecks and those can be removed at the factory.
4 slot mentality says you can put 2 sticks in at build time. add 2 later, and take the performance hit when the sticks dont like eachother. you end up trading performance for capacity. ive always preferred 2 slot boards for that reason, but having it on the cpu package makes that even better and frees up space on my mini itx for more nvme ssds. ram can also benefit from the cpu cooler.
This might actually be a great idea, Intel has in past released some mobile chips with on-package DRAM (Lunar Lake: Core Ultra 200V series; but that seems to be a one-off with TSMC produced dies?)
In an ideal world I would like to see maybe 16GB/32GB on package, and also either another SODIMM or a CAMM2 module for 3 or 4 total channels of RAM. As 16 or 20 cores become more common having 4 channels on consumer isn’t a bad thing, especially with the integrated GPU becoming more powerful as well.
24GB 3-channel or 32GB quad channel would be pretty nice.
If Valve releases the software stack for the Steam Frame you’ll be able to do the same on a Galaxy Fold 2 with a broken screen.
Word is the translation layer will let the headset natively play PC games. It is running on a similar processor to the Galaxy series. The Fold 2 comes with 12GB of RAM.
I had a laptop with DDR3 and a 10610u CPU, so 10th Gen in name for what it’s worth. It was from 2020, although the 10610 was a bit of a legacy option, the 6 core CPUs had DDR4
$70 on Craigslist? Not in my area. Every computer-related POS in my area must be gold plated, given the insane prices people are asking (and seem to be willing to pay).
i built my current computer when ddr5 had just come out. i intentionally chose a ddr4 mobo because ddr5 prices were through the roof at the time. fortunately i speced it with 32 gigs at build time and im good for the forseeable future. at most it delays a core components upgrade (cpu+ram+mobo) by a couple years. dont need a gpu upgrade. i can upgrade storage, peripherals, screen, or build a nas in the interim.
I wonder if anyone has tangibly measured what speeds you really need for RAM to introduce a bottleneck in most games. I feel like more often the issue is not having enough RAM.
These days 16GB may not be enough, since high-level devs have convinced themselves they don’t need to know how computers work, so you really should have 32 and some swap to be safe.
But RAM speed? I never see it talked about. I should look into it, bc maybe DDR3 is enough.
Ah I learned something new today. While it is obvious that older systems wouldn’t support new RAM tech like DDR4 and DDR5, I did NOT know that newer CPUs didn’t support DDR3, so even if you found some maxed out DDR3 that somehow had good enough latency (there are some) and bandwidth (there do NOT appear to be any), you couldn’t combine it with a CPU powerful enough to play (if the standard is 1080p 60fps max settings, which for me, it is)
I will run my 5900X, 5600X, and 2400G (file server) systems for some time to come. All run Linux of course. I was thinking of upgrading my workstation for fun (has to be for fun as no complaints on performance), but not now — unless something breaks of course. Not a gamer. Unless you count an occasional Chess game or Tux Racer…
While a DDR3 system would work in a pinch, not going to go backward. I have RPI-5s, 500, 500+ if I need to go that route for a desktop.
Uh, a thread with several of my posts appears to have been deleted. Let me try to summarize the information that was in there:
Intel 100 series chipsets support DDR3(L). They were designed for Skylake, but official BIOS updates usually add support for Kaby Lake. Inofficial BIOS mods can add support for Coffee Lake and Coffee Lake Refresh.
200 series chipsets also support DDR3(L), but all boards I could find require DDR4.
Of the 300 series (according to Wikipedia) only the H310C supports DDR3. Boards with DDR3 slots are e.g. Gigabyte H310M DS2V DDR3 and Biostar H310MHD3. These boards can run Coffee Lake out of the box and have official BIOS updates for Coffee Lake Refresh.
Some people say DDR3L must be used with these later CPU generations because the higher IO voltage of DDR3 damages the CPU in the long run.
The thread is back and coincidentally the link to report a post has disappeared.
What’s with all the spam? The comment section at hackaday is never this positive. And no-one has claimed to be able to do this with a 555
We’re working on it! There was a big database messup, and we’re still cleaning up after it.
MySQL IS a big database messup.
You messed up when you picked wordpress…
No escaping to a decent DB now.
Increase the frequency of routine reindexing and escape your bad choices with a job hop.
Never use MySQL again.
At least you’re consistent.
This clearly locks you into using Intel boards and CPUs, given AMD dropped DDR3 support with the introduction of their Zen architecture. And even for people who tend to stick with lower mid-range performance built up with the most economical old + current gen (used + budget oriented) parts, Intel stuff is the only option for DDR3, especially if you care at all about power consumption. (even if the performance of old AMD Piledriver AM3+ CPUs or Excavator FM2+ APU/CPUs was sufficient for some things, that would still generally be behind Core i5 and i7 and some i3 CPUs of similar vintage and often going back to intel CPUs from 2011 or 2012, with some exceptions of specific instruction extensions included on Excavator you’d clearly be better off with old Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs if you have to use DDR3, let alone any later stuff … plus the special case of LGA 2011 Sandy/Ivy Bridge E CPUs and quad-channel DDR3 support with enthusiast boards allowing 32 GB with 8x 4GB sticks and high bandwidth with cheaper old DDR3-1600, plus flexibility to overclock the memory bus/path due to signal generation you don’t have with LGA-1155).
If you don’t already have old hardware on hand, looking into specific performance bottlenecks, compatibility issues, and instruction extension requirements would be wise before getting into older gen and used stuff. (same deal for the separate issue of working out the best bang-for-buck GPU options, including looking into games with Vulkan support that might make AMD GPUs more appealing) That and single thread and lightly threaded bottlenecks for CPU performance, since this would definitely be one area where the older CPUs will be a limiting factor vs the clock rate and IPC of newer ones. (also why looking into using server class CPUs and some workstation class CPUs is often limited for gaming)