this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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As (relatively) old as they are, midrange Core i5 chips from Intel’s 12th-, 13th-, and 14th-generation Core CPU lineups are still solid choices for budget-to-midrange PC builds.
I would be hesitant about obtaining secondhand 13th or 14th gen desktop Intel CPUs, since those are the ones that destroy themselves over time. There is no way to know whether they've been run on non-updated BIOSes and damaged themselves. I burned through an i9-13900 and an i9-14900 myself. Started with occasional errors and gradually got worse until they couldn't even get through boot. I am sure that there are lots of people trying to unload damaged processors (knowingly or unknowingly) that have only seen the early stages of damage.
12th-gen CPUs are safe.
Consider pre-built systems. A quick glance at Dell’s Alienware lineup and Lenovo’s Legion lineup makes it clear that these towers still aren’t particularly price-competitive with similarly specced self-built PCs. This was true before there was a RAM shortage, and it’s true now. But for certain kinds of PCs, particularly budget PCs, it can still make more sense to buy than to build.
I just picked up two Alienware PCs for relatives to take advantage of this window, but it was only something like a two-week window, where Dell announced at the beginning of December that they were doing price increases to reflect the RAM shortage mid-December. I believe that that window is closed now (or, well, it might still be cheaper to get DIMMs with a PC than separate, but not to get memory that way at pre-memory-shortage prices any more).
EDIT: From memory, Lenovo announced that they were doing their RAM-induced price increases at the beginning of January, so for Lenovo, it might still work for another week-and-a-half or so.
EDIT2: 15th gen Intel CPUs are also safe WRT damage, but like AMD's AM5-socket processors, they can't use DDR4 memory, which is what the author is trying to find a route to do.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
That's exactly what I'm thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I'm not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I'm just miffed that I said I'd get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.
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/dp/B0FY4CQRYF
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.
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.
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they've already done the technical work).
Funny enough, I'm actually running bazzite. That's why i know there's a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
I want to be able to run VRChat at high FPS even in the fanciest of settings with a lot of high quality avatars.
I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it's vaguely like Second Life, popular with folks creating adult-content-oriented-worlds.
From a technical standpoint, that might actually be a pretty good example of a game that would benefit from cloud gaming, since I assume that it's not all that latency-critical, not the way an FPS would be.
I guess that there would potentially be privacy issues with adult content stuff that would argue against cloud hosting, but in the case of VRChat, the service itself is already living in the cloud, so...shrugs
VR doesn’t work with cloud gaming, the latency would make you throw up immediately.
That's fair, but my understanding is that VRChat, despite the name, isn't a VR-only thing.
I want:
- Multitasking speed
- Fast SSD storage for dev tasks, builds...etc
- Large SSD storage for games
- Memory to run multiple development environments, lots of research tabs, and not have to turn them off to go play a game for a couple hours
- A GPU capable of playing most games on decent settings on a 4k monitor (upscaling allowed)
So generally this means:
- mid-high end CPU
- mid GPU
- 64+ GB RAM
- 1x High Performance 1TB m.2 SSD as primary drive
- 1x w/e 2TB m.2 SSD for secondary
RAM prices makes this.... Absurd. My current PC is actually getting a bit slow for me now, it's about 5 years old now, and it's time for an upgrade. Which is going to cost me 2-3x what it should, simply from RAM....
I commented elsewhere in the thread that one option that can mitigate limited RAM for some users is to get a fast, dedicated NVMe swap device, stick a large pagefile/paging partition on it, and let the OS page out stuff that isn't actively being used. Flash memory prices are up too, but are vastly cheaper than RAM.
My guess is that this generally isn't the ideal solution for situations where one RAM-hungry game is what's eating up all the memory, but for some things you mention (like wanting to leave a bunch of browser tabs open while going to play a game), I'd expect it to be pretty effective.
dev tasks, builds…etc
I don't know how applicable it is to your use case, but there's ccache to cache compiled binaries and distcc to do distributed C/C++ builds across multiple machines, if you can coral up some older machines.
It looks like Mozilla's sccache does both caching and distributed builds, and supports Rust as well. I haven't used it myself.
I waited too long to buy a new PC. I thought the later, the better. And now this.
Well, Windows 10 support runs until October 2026.
The sirens of Linux call to you in the meantime.
Yes, 30 years ago.
Long time user, first time caller.
What... what does that mean?
S.u.S.E. Linux April 1995.
I thought the later, the better
Well, usually that is true.
Windows 10 ltsc?
I assume this:
The tech giant previously announced that users can pay for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates to get patches for another year, but this week it revealed additional enrollment options, including free alternatives for individual users.
Specifically, consumers can pay roughly $30 per PC (depending on location) to enroll in the ESU program and receive security updates for one year after Windows 10 reaches EOS.
If they don’t want to spend money, they can simply start using Windows Backup to sync their settings to the cloud. It’s worth noting that Microsoft recommends Windows Backup for backing up files and settings before switching to Windows 11.
Another ESU option that does not involve spending actual money is to enroll for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which users earn for engaging with Microsoft products and services, such as Bing, Xbox and Microsoft Store.
“ESU coverage for personal devices runs from Oct. 15, 2025, through Oct. 13, 2026,” Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi explained.
So you can get one extra year, but you need to tie the PC's Administrator account to a Microsoft account, and either need to pay a $30 subscription fee, spend their Microsoft Rewards points, or set the PC to sync to their cloud service.
The normal Windows 10. ESU in the European Economic Area (EEA).
if you can't switch to linux, upgrade windows to LTSC. massgrave.dev is your friend, they have installers and an activator, maybe it can even change the windows type without reinstall.
and then start planning your transition to linux. don't overthink it, just what you need, and what files you need over there, especially before deleting windows. fedora kde edition is a good starter distro, you shouldn't need to tinker it if you don't want
Yeah, this will make RAM prices cheaper. For sure.
well, not the main topic, but no need to be hostile, the last sentence made me think this is another problem to you
Not a hardware fix, but there's memory compression. It sounds like Windows 11 defaults to having memory compression on:
Linux has zswap and zram to do memory compression, which I've mentioned here recently. I don't know of any distros that turn it on by default. It sounds from recent reading like for modern systems with SSD swap, zswap is probably preferable to zram.
Why do you need a computer? Here is the AI on your smartphone, enjoy!
“Do you guys not have phones?“
Is it time to start shucking mini pcs and game consoles?
As a silver lining, you think this could stabilize GPU prices? Or at least CPU prices?
If there's less RAM/SSDs to build PCs with, then people will buy fewer GPUs/CPUs for them.
GPUs also need memory. So they aren't escaping this from a consumer POV. Not to mention how production capacity is still being sucked up data centres, but now for AI.
GPU prices
Outside of maybe integrated GPUs, I doubt it, because they need their own memory and are constrained by the same bottleneck
DRAM.
Or at least CPU prices?
I've read one article arguing that CPU prices will likely drop during the RAM shortage.
I don't know if that's actually true
I think that depends very much on the ability of CPU manufacturers to economically scale down their production to match demand, and I don't know to what degree that is possible. If they need to commit to a given amount of production in advance, then yeah, probably.
Go back a couple years, and DRAM manufacturers
who are currently making a ton of money due to the massive surge in demand from AI
were losing a ton of money, because they couldn't inexpensively rapidly scale production up and down to match demand. I don't know what the economics are like for CPUs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fear-dram-glut-stifling-micron-155958125.html
November 5, 2018
To be clear, the oversupply concerns that have plagued Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU) shares for weeks now are completely valid. Micron stock has fallen as much as 40% just since June on this deteriorating dynamic.
In short, the world doesn’t need as many memory chips as Micron and rivals like Samsung (OTCMKTS:SSNLF) and SK Hynix are collectively making. The glut is forcing the price of DRAM (dynamic random access memory) modules so low that it’s increasingly tougher to make a buck in the business.
We had a glut of DRAM as late as early this year:
https://evertiq.com/news/56996
Weak Demand and Inventory Backlogs
Both the DRAM and the NAND markets are still in a state of oversupply, with excess inventory leading to significant price declines through Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. This is driven by multiple factors such as weak consumer demand.
Memory manufacturers ramped up production during previous periods of strong demand, but the market failed to meet these forecasts. This has resulted in inventory backlogs that now weigh on prices.
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it? Anyone do this?
My old HTPC is running a Z87 motherboard with a 4770k i5 cpu with 16gb of ddr3 ram. It is chugging along. I had plans to build out something new in the same case but I don’t want to feed into this bullshit by buying now. The more people show their willingness to pay these prices the happier manufacturers and retailers will be to charge them. But I think it might get worse, too, and maybe not better. Ugh.
Whatever I build might be the last one I do considering how long I kept this one.
What is the feasibility of getting a prebuilt gaming PC and using it for the parts I need/want and selling the rest of it?
I'm sure that you could do that, but I think part of the problem there is that everyone else is going to be in the same boat, short of RAM, and I'm not sure what demand there is for a gaming PC stripped of its RAM.
If there isn't much demand, you might have trouble recouping what you spent on the parts you don't want.
I read one article that CPU prices may drop, because the increased RAM prices will drive up PC prices, price some people out of the market, and so there will be less demand for CPUs.
That’s an interesting theory on the CPUs. Though it walways takes longer for prices to drop than it does to rise. I’ll be keeping an eye out.
You’re right that selling the parts may not actually be profitable or even recoup expenses. Though I was thinking I had a gpu that’s decent enough for my 1080p gaming so could sell whatever 5000 series comes with it for cheap and give someone a nice deal.
I just bought a used HP office computer basically for the 32 GB of DDR5 (only 5200 but I'll take it) on eBay. Just gonna throw a 9060xt in it for now. Combined its a sub 700 build. I'll probably swap it to a new mobo and case next year as the power supply is a little underspeccd and I believe the HP pinout is nonstandard. Maybe I'll just jam a flex PSU in there and pin the cables to match.