I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
I went to a pc building shop and the price of 64 RAM DDR5 was over $1000. I could have built an entire PC with that price a year ago.
DDR4 is serviceable to me.
Here’s some actual advice for PC builders - what do you actually want from your system? Nothing you say can be vague, you have to set up goals. That’s the entire important note of PC building is what you’re building it for and how long you want it to last for as in, how long until you’re wanting to build another?
Yeah. I’m on a relatively old build with DDR4, but still a decent processor and GPU. So far gaming have not been an issue with whatever I’m throwing at it. Not much in the way of loading times, and no real problem with the size of it. Some less game-y stuff, like video transcoding and 3D renders, also fine. And while I can see those improving somewhat with DDR5, I’m not sure it’s the actual bottleneck. And gaming won’t be much better with it… I mean seriously, moving loading times from 3 seconds to 2? I don’t really care.
The real issue will be when things starts to break down, as hardware do over time. It’s not that I want to replace the hardware if there’s no pressure from the software side, but I will have to if RAM goes bad, or motherboard decide to not power up.
I want to be able to run VRChat at high FPS even in the fanciest of settings with a lot of high quality avatars.
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
One thing I’ve run into is not performance with old hardware but missing features from the CPU/GPU. Think of tpm 2.0 requirements for Windows 11. There’s other obscure instruction sets that newer games and programs require such as resizeable bar if you want to run a local llm.
My PC currently experiences a memory overload if I play ~150mods Skyrim for more than 2 hours straight. I currently have 16gb DDR4, Gtx1660 Nvidia. My thoughts are that the graphics card is the weak link but those are still too big a ticket.
If it’s a leak in a mod and some pages just aren’t being accessed at all, then I’d think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don’t need all that much space to just store swap, and it’s vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal
I have no idea the degree to which “lots of cheap, fast swap” helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it’ll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.
If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it’ll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don’t expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn’t need to last forever.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
Sadly it may actually be your ram. I had a 1660 until a couple months ago and the card kept up fine, at least for older games. With 16gb of memory though my system kept bottlenecking. Upgrading to 32 was like a breath of fresh air
Playing it on a lean linux distro (or simply neutering Windows heavily) helps a ton. There’s tons of Windows stuff that just sits in the background for no reason.
There are also texture optimizers for Skyrim, and some other performance mods.