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

What happened

According to a report published by The Register on Wednesday, 14 October 2026 at 16:00 UTC, Gigabyte recently announced new motherboards that use DDR4 RAM, a standard that launched in 2014. For AM4 processors, Gigabyte offers the new B450M H ARGB with two DDR4 slots and the B550 X-Eagle with four slots, while Intel-platform buyers can get the B760M Aorus Elite. The article states this is partly due to the current price rises and component shortages induced by large-scale, cloud-based LLMs. In the People's Republic of China, several vendors sell new DDR3 motherboards for circa 15-year-old server CPUs, such as Huananzhi's X79-4D or X79 Supreme, or the Machinist X79 V2.82H, all using Intel's LGA-2011 socket, which launched in 2011. The DDR5 standard was agreed in 2020, with mainstream PC adoption following in 2021. The article also argues that Linux lets older hardware remain in service, making second-hand kit more usable than ever.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: The Register · 10/14/2026 · View original source