this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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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?
Instructions unclear. Purchased a 5090, 9800X3D and 64gb DDR5 RAM for playing Terraria. Also, it has shiny lights.
I want:
So generally this means:
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.
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.
My predicament, personally, is that my computer is starting to feel slow to me but I'm on AM4 and ddr4. The good jumps in performance are to be had in moving to the newer generations, which means that buying ram cannot be avoided. The suboptimal move is to stay on this legacy platform and be satisfied with marginal gains while investing further into hardware that will become obsolete sooner
Or use zram/zswap on Linux with ZSTD compression, which dedicates part of physical RAM to compressed swap.
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.
DDR4 does not fit in my DDR5 slots.
Don't buy a DDR 5 mobo?
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.
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.
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).
I think there are already community tools for texture management and decompression.
And… I don’t know. There’s such a critical mass of mods now that it doesn’t seem worth breaking compatibility with them all once again?
The Skyrim mod scene is actually extremely messy; if you look at other bigs ones (like, say, Stardew Valley), there’s a lot more cohesiveness and performance consciousness among modders. Or Mass Effect, which is more consolidated amongst a few big modsz
So I think the Skyrim community could do a better job of creating an easier to set up, more performant out-of-the-box experience for players, even as jank as the game is. But the game just has a different culture around it, I think.
Funny enough, I'm actually running bazzite. That's why i know there's a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol
Well, just to rule it out, have you tried Windows? Like a neutered windows with defender disabled and such.
I’ve found that Linux can get rather fussy under high memory pressure. It works and doesn’t crash, but it also really bogs down anything high performance once the swapping begins.
It can also get fussy with Nvidia.
So I’m not saying Skyrim will run better on Windows, but it might be worth a shot.
I run CachyOS, yet I still keep Windows around for some other heavily modded games.