in 2020 ddr3 memory is now officially more expensive than ddr4 memory and
you're probably sitting here scratching your head like
how and why is this possible well in today's video i'm going to go through
all the factors at play here but of course there's the biggest one at play
and that is used price performance or older stuff
is still in such high demand and i'm not saying this because
i'm a big advocate of used price performance here on the channel with
tech yes city i'm saying this because this is just how
it is when you go get a used build and use second third fourth
gen oem most of the times that's gonna have
maybe two four eight gigabytes maximum of ddr3 memory
in it and most people wanting a gaming pc want 16 gigabytes of
ram so there's already pent up demand for extra ddr3 memory
especially new then there's also on top of that
another thing you can do with used builds that you can't do with a new
build that is you've got a windows 7 oem sticker on it you can grab that slap
it in a case and you don't even have to buy any
windows 10 license at all so there's things that use price
performance can do that you can't and of course that's
coming in especially on the entry level where you
can get a mid-range graphics card and yeah and i've covered this heaps of
times here at the channel in the past you're not going to be losing a whole
lot of performance then of course there's
motherboard manufacturers especially on aliexpress
these guys are making new motherboards for these older platforms with
a lot of these older xeons that are coming out of servers
they're taking the xeons out but since the motherboards aren't being
manufactured anymore and of course used motherboards are
clonking out on people with builds the cpus are still fine
there's this pent-up demand for new motherboards that support ddr3
so basically demand for the ddr3 memory is there
in 2020 i just didn't realize that there was
so much demand for it that it would send the prices
of the memory more than ddr4 so what we've got here is for
example an australian retailer so we're going to pop this up
we've got here a 8 gigabyte stick of ddr3 memory going for 49 aussie dollars
now we look at the speeds of 1600 megahertz
and this is the cheapest i can find in a straight here
then we've got a ddr4 stick of memory 2666 going for 45 aussie dollars so this
is true i'm seeing this in the retailers not
just the spot exchange prices so we'll look at
that now there's two different spot exchanges and they're reporting the same
data here and so what we can see is this top one we've got to pay attention to
this because basically ddr4 you can put a single side and have an
eight gigabyte stick and that's going for an average of two
dollars and 62 cents right for those little chips
then we've got here right you can compare these if you want to compare
apples to apples sure you can do that but most people just want to get the
cheapest stick possible right if we're talking about
getting the cheapest stick possible and putting in a dual channel this is what a
lot of people can do and of course you can overclock this stuff
just like you can overclock this stuff right here
but this right here is going for a dollar forty six for four gigabytes
and so of course you double that and you get two dollars and 92 cents
so it is right it is going for 30 cents more to get an 8 gigabyte stick together
than it is for an 8 gigabyte stick of ddr3 memory
so there's your problem right there and it exists the prices are officially
more expensive but there's also some other factors at
play of course we've got the pent-up demand there
which is causing the prices to go but another reason being is that we've had
the factories that make ddr3 a lot of those switched over to ddr4
and so the the actual production of ddr3 memory
as a whole compared to what it was say five years ago
is down in general and it's not like they can go back and
make another ddr3 ram factory because i guess they perceive that as being an
unreliable option it's not consistent they don't know when ddr3 memory might
become out of fashion and if you've invested
all this money in a factory then you could really come into some financial
pain so the factory in the production line isn't
there to begin with two and then there's the next reason right
here and that goes hand in hand with why the factories
wouldn't be willing to invest and make a whole new ddr3 production line
and that is this stuff's been out for 13 years it's been released
since 2007. so that's i guess in a nutshell what's
going on with ddr3 memory but me personally i look for this stuff
used i sometimes buy it new in uh batch
quantities and the suppliers are telling me when they give me the quote list
for the prices of ddr3 this is why i'm making this video i saw the quote list
and i'm like i'm scratching my head and just like you
guys are scratching your head i'm like what this is the first time i've seen
ddr3 now more expensive than baseline ddr4 memory
and i asked them i'm like is did you guys make a mistake
and then they said no that's just how it is and so i'm like whoa
like what is going on here and so i guess
especially with uh what's going on around the world at the moment
a lot more people are staying home there's a lot more demand for gaming pcs
and because say for instance you've got such a weird thing going on where
cases and power supplies will be out of stock so a lot of people will turn to
the used market for gaming pcs and so all the guys like
me who put together pcs are now suddenly on
overdrive putting together more gaming pcs and
like damn run out of ddr3 memory and that's
exactly what is happening to me i'm running out of ddr3 memory i mean i did
come into a recent stash from two sources
i got a guy locally here ed he sold me a heap of um
ddr3 memory and then i also cleaned out darth jar jar for 48 gigabytes of the
stuff and so that's that's a when you're in a
clutch situation you've got to make some uh sacrifices
and perform and so that's what i'm doing personally with ddr3 memory but another
thing as well this is another thing to think of if
you're building yourself a personal rig i'll show you guys an option that you
may wish to consider and that is ddr3 ecc registered now
this is not going to work on standard i7s for instance an i7 4770 is not going
to be able to support this stuff but you can just see the sheer price
right 60 bucks aussie if you buy four of these kits so
if you're doing builds you can buy four you can get 128
gigabytes of this stuff for 200 aussie dollars which would be
i'd say close to around 140 us that's a heap of memory that's like
about 25 percent of the price of our ddr3
memory on the market at the moment that's what
you can get it for so ddr3 registered is definitely an option if you uh like
to delve in the land of xeons like i do so you can get a
second gen xeon with an x79 aliexpress board some of
them are pretty decent by the way and then you get 16 gigabytes of this
stuff and you'll have a 16 year by gaming pc
for a lot cheaper than going with the i7 standard consumer route
and so especially the value on some of those xeons you get like an eight core
16 thread second gen that'll still play games absolutely fine with an rx470 and
stuff like that you can still get that stuff really
cheap and i've made videos on this in the past
with uh cheap xeons but this is a real benefit
when you look at the price of this stuff ecc registered memory
this is a real benefit to use price performance at the moment this
one's a little bit of a goldmine but getting back to the topic of why ecc
registered ddr3 memory is very cheap
that's because it's being pulled off servers at the moment in mass
and they're pulling the xeons out of those things but at the same time
there's not that much demand for it because everyone wants the i5 and the i7
which doesn't support that stuff then on top of that you've got really in
the server industry there's only demand for ddr4 ecc registered that's why
you'll see the prices of that generally comes in more expensive than
ddr4 unbuffered so you've got the reverse situation
going on in ddr3 as to what's going on in the ddr4 world
so if you guys are into building gaming pcs you just
may wish to consider getting some ddr3 registered stuff and going with a xeon
that's just an option it's something i'm going to be looking into seriously
myself being strained for memory right now
but as it stands hopefully you guys enjoyed this video
hopefully it was a lot of insight and let us know in the comment section below
what you think of ddr3 ram pricing have you done many builds yourself with ddr3
do you do more ddr4 builds i mean the way prices are going
this is definitely going to be pushing people in the direction of you
new builds i've thought about i'm like what's the point of building an older
system when you've got like say for instance a
ryzen 3 3 100 you can get an a320 motherboard and ddr3
memory and then overclock it a little bit
or just clock it to 20s you know some of those boards are actually really good i
shouldn't say overclock it because you can't really overclock on a lot of a320s
but some of those boards are really good where they've got profiles in them where
you can just lock in these memory profiles and they work
really well you can get 3 000 megahertz out of even just the cheap stuff but do
let us know in the comment section below what you're doing at the moment and what
build you've got going on because i love reading your thoughts and
opinions as always just like this question of the day here
which comes from vex u666 and they asked did you try the same motherboard with
another cpu could also be the pcie slot so this
question i answered in the first minute of the video
and yes i did try multiple different motherboards that wasn't the problem but
if you've got a question like and you want an answer
please at least watch the video or at least the first minute of it
anyway guys i'll catch you in another tech video very soon if you enjoyed
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peace out for now bye
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