New motherboards, old RAM, plenty of life left in yesterday's PCs

Gigabyte recently announced new motherboards that use DDR4 RAM, a standard that launched in 2014, and other vendors support even older standards in brand-new kit.

Earlier this year, AMD released a Ryzen 7 5800X3D anniversary edition to mark ten years of AM4.

For AM4 processors, Gigabyte offers the new B450M H ARGB, with two DDR4 slots, and the B550 X-Eagle with four slots.

Those who prefer Intel chippery can now buy a B760M Aorus Elite.

This is notable because of the age of the DDR4 spec.

In case you lose track of these things, The Register first described the new DDR4 spec back in 2012, and a few months later urged the keen to wait a year or two.

DDR5 supports higher transfer rates, and The Reg predicted its arrival in 2017.

The DDR5 standard was agreed in 2020, with mainstream PC adoption following in 2021.

Over in the People's Republic of China, several vendors will sell you new DDR3 motherboards for 15-year-old server CPUs, such as Huananzhi's X79-4D or X79 Supreme, or the Machinist X79 V2.82H.

These use Intel's LGA-2011 socket – named for the number of pins, but coincidentally launched in 2011.

This Chinese SMZDM community discussion is about whether the circa 15-year-old Xeon E5 is still worth buying – a CPU The Reg covered in 2012.

This is partly due to the current price rises and component shortages induced by large-scale, cloud-based LLMs – but also "training" those "open-weight" models that run on your own kit.

Those too are constructed in giant datacenters stuffed full of GPUs, ingesting all the human-written material they can get their hands on, rarely asking for consent.

And not just stuff put online either.