Published 1 minute ago
His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
The current PC hardware landscape is unfriendly to say the least. The DRAM price hike has made building a new PC basically untenable, and many are turning to the used market to at least try and off…
Published 1 minute ago
His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
The current PC hardware landscape is unfriendly to say the least. The DRAM price hike has made building a new PC basically untenable, and many are turning to the used market to at least try and offset costs a little bit. If you’ve made an upgrade to your system recently, or have older RAM lying around, you might be tempted to jump into the used market to make a buck, and while I wouldn’t blame anyone for that, there are other ways to use your extra RAM that don’t involve selling it.
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Start a home lab
You already have the most expensive part
While RAM prices have skyrocketed, most other parts have stayed relatively steady in terms of their price, at least for now. Components that use DRAM will go up in price naturally. However, the parts you need to start a home lab, both new and used, are still totally reasonable. You already have the most expensive part of the build if you plan to use off-the-shelf desktop components.
There really has never been a better time to start a home lab. A home lab lets you experiment with virtualization, containers, automation, and self-hosting in a way that’s impossible to replicate on a single daily-driver PC. You can break things, rebuild them, and learn how real systems behave without risking your main machine.
If you already run a home lab, slotting in your spare RAM — if compatible, of course — can give your setup a little extra juice. Home lab workloads are almost always memory-bound before they’re CPU-bound. Extra RAM directly translates into more containers, more virtual machines, and more headroom to experiment.
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Build a NAS
A great project that doesn’t need a lot of RAM
Building a NAS is one of those projects that is difficult to get off the ground, but completely changes how you use every device you own. Once you have centralized, always-available storage, your PCs, laptops, and phones can stop relying on cloud services for your important data. Files are where you expect them to be, backups can happen automatically, and media can be streamed locally instead of bouncing off the cloud. It’s one of the most practical upgrades you can make to your home, and besides the cost of storage, the rest of it can be done for relatively cheap, especially if you already have the memory on hand.
Existing file servers can benefit from additional memory, using it for caching, metadata, and smoothing out access across multiple clients. Faster memory doesn’t matter nearly as much as enough memory, which makes slotting in older, spare DIMMs ideal for the job, if your NAS build can take them.
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Save it for troubleshooting
You never know when you’ll need a kit of RAM
This is the least glamorous option, but arguably one of the most valuable right now. Memory issues can masquerade as almost anything: corrupted installs, random crashes, unexplained blue screens, or systems that refuse to boot after a restart. Being able to swap in spare RAM immediately is invaluable when new kits are expensive or hard to find. During a DRAM shortage, troubleshooting becomes riskier if you don’t have backups. If your primary memory kit starts behaving erratically, you don’t want to be forced into an urgent purchase at peak pricing just to get a system operational again.
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10 ways to repurpose old PC components for DIY projects
Struggling to put old PC components to good use? Here are 10 excellent ways to repurpose them into something great.
Give it to a friend
’Tis the season!
While selling old RAM might not feel worth the effort, giving it to someone else can have a big impact, especially right now. Plenty of everyday PCs are stuck with minimal memory, and upgrading them has become more expensive than it used to be. A free or cheap hand-me-down kit can dramatically improve responsiveness for basic tasks.
For students, family members, or friends running older systems, RAM upgrades are often the most noticeable improvement they can make. In a market where entry-level upgrades are getting pricier, passing along working memory helps extend the life of hardware that would otherwise struggle.
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Right now, more than ever, RAM is a luxury item, especially the new, faster spec stuff, but that doesn’t mean your older sticks no longer have value. There aren’t many people out there sitting on fresh kits of DDR5, but if you have some DDR4 (or even DDR3!) lying around, putting them to good use can often be a more rewarding route than making a few bucks. I wouldn’t blame anyone for going the latter route, and while you wouldn’t think of it as a conventional starting point for projects, in the current landscape it is.