Hackaday

With modern RAM prices skyrocketing, DDR3 memory presents a viable budget alternative for gaming PCs. Testing shows that systems built with 12-15 year old DDR3-supporting motherboards (x79 and z97 chipsets) paired with modern graphics cards can run current games at playable framerates. The z97 chipset with Haswell processors is recommended for better compatibility with modern games requiring AVX2 instructions. DDR3 costs less than $1/GB, making maxed-out configurations affordable despite slower transfer speeds compared to DDR5.

RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously!

Love the post content but i dislike the title.
It suggests you could plug DDR3 into anything as an easy solution, which is not true.
I still love that you advocate for using old but working hardware :)

For real, my gaming rig runs on a 4th Gen i5 with 32GB of DDR3 and a RTX 3060. Plays most titles at 1080p with decent frame rates. Could they run smoother on newer hardware? Yes! Do I care multiple hundreds of euros much? No!

There is ton of old hardware that is very usable. People are just spoiled to the point if it’s not the newest and shiniest then it’s crap at the same time using theirs’s thousands dollars phones to watch s*it on the social media … agh. If you are not working in very demanding field, then using even couple of years old hardware is not a problem.

Not sure about DDR3, but DDR4 are perfectly viable and good enough still.

DDR5 is a gold standard fetish, most people couldn’t tell the difference (nor they need to) between performance on a DDR4 and even DDR5 in the same machine and game running on the same settings.