DDR2 Has Been DEAD For Years... Still Worth it? 

I have some DDR2 at 1200 Mhz , pretty sure that is the fastest .

The 840T has two disabled cores. With some luck, you can unlock it to a penta or hexa core.

Being outside doesn’t stop me from watching even if it makes me look…special

I believe another part of the reason why this DDR2 era stuff is getting expensive is because its starting to see itself lumped in with the "muh vintage gaming!!! retro hardware!!!" era of things. A lot of people are wanting to make dream systems from that era (I mean hey, myself included!) so we can run our games that, at that time, we had to patiently endure at 800x600 30FPS, but now we can run them at max settings and high resolutions to fill in some stupid void that we have :)

i use a core2duo thinkpad x200 pretty regularly, it's amazing how capable these old machines are with maxed ram and an ssd

Unfortunately in countrys like Denmark people think everything from a computer is GOLD or DIAMONDS... The prizes are WAY to high for old items My "old" system still runs AMD Phenom II 965 BE

LGA 775 and AM2 sockets are still perfectly good for browsing web and creating your presentation or a document. It can even game for the most games till 2016-2017. I'm to this day still love em and use em. And the DDR3 systems sometimes costs more than the DDR4 system in my region. And the DDR2 systems cost hilariously low. I can do the 10-15$ fully working 775 PC with the GPU. And it seems perfectly good and valuable for such a price.

I'm in my mid 30s. I feel a lot of sentimental feelings towards this era of hardware as I probably did most of my gaming during this time period.

I'm not a big gamer so an appropriate DDR2 system works fine for every day use. An Optiplex 745 with 8 gigs of fast DDR2, fully updated BIOS and a Q6600 is just fine for puttering around on the Internet. Of course, I run Linux (either Xubuntu or Mint) so I'm working with an OS with less bloat in it.

Had a 1090T + 1600Mhz DDR3 with 650ti boost. Ran 4k video and games flawless. Over a decade ago! The 1090T had a better architecture than Bulldozer but on a 45nm versus the bulldozers 32.

4 years ago I was using some kind of Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, 500GB HDD and nvidia Quadro 600 GPU. It wasn't good, but it taught me to be patient. I was recording videos, editing videos, I learned photoshop on it, music production, even some gaming. I managed to change options, so the system will run at it's best. But sure, it was crap and I don't want to go back anymore.

Lol. I just learned about your channel today while researching DDR3 RAM options and watching your most recent video on it, and low-and-behold behold your next video inspired by it (DDR2) was posted just earlier today. X)

This is a situation where a version of windows called ltsc would help a lot with that cpu usage

I refurbish old computers as a personal hobby. I recently pulled an old Dell Inspiron from 2008-2009 out of my mom's garage. I had no idea what to expect. I was not expecting 2 1GB sticks of DDR2. I was expecting less than that lol. Also it had a Radeon HD 4350, also equally not great

My favorite channel I swear, just watched ur catalog yesterday

To fix that erorr you would have to; When it asks "Where do you want to install windows?" Press Shift+F10 and command prompt will open. Click within the command prompt window, and type "diskpart" and then list disk. select disk numberhere clean and one completed type exit in the command prompt window. And then head to the "Where do you want to install windows?" Click refresh. And then click "new". and after going thru that hit "Next" and Windows will begin to install. Hope this message appears and helps you as the problem isn't your install media and it's the way the hard disk drive was setup and has to be dealt with using diskpart.

My home server use DDR2... Athlon II X2 250 with 4GB ram. Fileserver, Home Assistant, 5 Octoprint instances, DLNA, DNS filtering... Works really nice.

@aChair Leg the windows issue is something i have come accros myself, to fix it you need to clean the drive. in the windows usb booted press shift + f10 and type diskpart. list disk. select disk . clean. than go back and install windows normally. i dont know why windows ( even 10 and 11) cant figure this out but hopefully this helps

I remember paying almost $350 for a 1.2 Gig hard drive... and $250 for a 16 Meg ATI All in Wonder card... Those were the days. Ram was like 4 Meg was huge. Those were the days. As long as it played Doom and/or Quake you were golden.

I found a ODD DDR2 PC on TRASH, the pc had a xeon e 3450, 6GB DDR2 667MHz and the most odd part was the fact the PC camr with a 480 GB SSD with 100% Health and a GT 1030 and the last two parts work.

Thank you for this video, i only upgraded from that Asus M4a785-M mobo last year after a decade of running it. Still have it sitting in static wrap trying to find a home for it as it has the Phenom ii x6 1100T with 8 Gigs of G.Skill 1066 ram on it. The Mobo Auto OC'd it to the 1200 for me and WOW that made a big difference for that system. Had a 1050 Ti on it and was playing Red Dead 2 just fine on a mix of low and medium settings, if i could find someone local who wanted it i'd give it away just to see it stay in use. Never even OC'd the CPU was to scared to mess with that part as i didn't know what i was doing there.

Great video mate as always 😎

My HTPC is still an old HP dc7900 SFF with a C2Q Q6600 @ 3.0GHz (BSEL modded), 8GB DDR2 and a Radeon HD 6570. I do also have another Core2 Quad system with a Q9550 @ 3.4GHz but it has an Asus P5KC which is a DDR2/DDR3 (4x DDR2, 2x DDR3) combo board and I'm currently running it with 2x4GB DDR3 sticks

I still have a few c2q systems laying around. One of them, a p5qem has a xeon e5450 and is foldingathome 24/7 in the garage, has been for years now, it just keeps on ticking. It was a (LAN) minecraft server for a while, and worked well.

Thanks for jumping down the rabbit hole so we don't have too. ;). If anything this was a good way to see how far we have come with hardware. I started with the Sinclair ZX80 with 1k of memory. Talk about a dinosaur! New subscriber. ❤

A possible issue that i've run into before, and based on your video footage of it, windows may not want to install to an existing partition, delete the partition, click the unpartitioned space as where you want to install and hit next, do not hit new.

Realistically, you're not going to be running Windows 10 and modern games on a DDR2 era system. You'd buy it absolutely to replace parts in, or even build from scratch, a retro system.

This is a great quality video for a small channel. Earned a sub from me. Great pc tech content.

I was using a Q6600 BSEL'd to 3GHz with 8GB of gamer DDR2-800 and an ATI 5770 as a daily up until last May. It's fun getting games to run alright on that old hunk; battlefield 4 was very playable after some effort. Minecraft was also fantastic with performance mods when playing on a server; modern world generation was a bit too taxing to be smooth, but hey, just put that on another computer. I do intend to upgrade this system to a yorkfield xeon sometime still, and to use it for other light tasks, like maybe a drawing desk computer or a CNC controller. Edit: also, dolphin ran better for me than for you and I'm not entirely sure why. I even ran breath of the wild on cemu on the thing, and that was back when it was running 2.4ghz with 6gb of ddr2-667 and a spinning disk. I've got a video of that on my channel from early 2020 if you'd like to behold it. It was not playable but it sure was fun.

I am in current possesion of a dell XPS 630i system with a core 2 quad extreme using DDR2. It was supposed to be a very cool video about old school gaming hardware. Unfortunately, trying to use it was painful. It is still on the shelf, so we will see what happens in the future.

i have an old computer with asus p5b motherboard, so this video for me is the one that made me so nostalgic about past times... love it.

WOAH I WAS REALLY THINKING ABOUT ONE OF THOSE, MY DAD HAD ONE IN HIS IT OFFICE AND ALWAYS WANTED ONE, ONE OF those server z400 things

even the the old gen quad core cpus are still useful. I brought new life to a system that previously had dual core i3.

My therory these system are realy great for late windows XP - early windows 7 retro gaming ! Personnaly, i have one core 2 duo and one core 2 quad system for windows xp. Plus you add the fact the motherboard are rarer and you have a market pushing a bit pricy price tag for old tech !

I still have a PC I built on 775 platform. Started out with the early C2D E6600 which kept going for ages. In 2016 I bought a C2Q Q6600 (SLACR) for a CPU swap and overclocked this a little. Bought a C2Q Q6700 as well to see if it clocked better. My motherboard could only handle the earlier C2D/C2Q. I did pick up extra sticks of RAM when I was helping recycle old PCs. Corsair XMS2 2 GB (2 x 1 GB) DDR2-800 CL4 Memory Corsair XMS2 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) DDR2-800 CL5 Memory I hardly turn this PC on anymore but it does have DVD drives in the tower, lol. My main PC is the i7-5960x

3:23 I had that weird issue before, turns out the drive that you're going to install Windows has to be in [Hard Drive BBS Properties] and [Boot Option Priorities]. Most importantly, it needs to be in MBR instead of GPT.(Shift + F10 and use diskpart to see if it's in MBR)

i have a old server that i bought it has 64 gb of ddr2 a xeon x5650 and it used to have a rx 580 but i upgraded it to a rx6600 is it a good pc?

Cool video idea, wanna see more goofy ideas like this video.

I was using a core2quad with 8 gigs of ddr2 up until 2020 with no issues. That system with a 760ti and ssd played basic games and psx/gamecube emulators great

about the harddisk issue, have you tried to convert the disks from GPT to MBR filetable?

You should've played Palworld just so you could market it as a PalWorld Compatible PC :P keep it up my guy!

I have 2 old machines packed in boxes. One is a Dell GTX 520 with an Intel Pentium 4 with hyperthreading 3.40GHZ and 4GB of DDR2 with Windows 7. The other is also a Windows XP Dell with IIRC an Intel Celeron D 330 running at 2.66 GHZ and 2GB of DDR. I don't know why I keep them maybe deeply embedded sentimental reasons I may need counseling for but if the prices keep going up I'll sell them. I was forced to upgrade to 64 bit stuff and when I got a "new" used Dell T3620 with an I5-6500 I really noticed what I was missing and that set me off. I have like 8 PC's that I have learned to take apart and upgrade and possibly flip. I even discovered PC gaming at 61 years old and a new hobby and channels like this have been very helpful.

I have 16GB DDR2 in my current dual CPU E5 2667 V4 rig. It's in a RAM drive and pretty much saturates the SATAII connection it's attached to.

To improve speeds on older systems especially with spinning rust; disable sysmain and windows search in services and prefetch and superfetch in the registry. The improvements are astounding

WOAH I WAS REALLY THINKING ABOUT ONE OF THOSE, MY DAD HAD ONE IN HIS IT OFFICE AND ALWAYS WANTED ONE

I still have an FX8350 paired with an RX580 8gb and 32gb DDR3 1866Mhz. One SSD for OS and three HDD installed with backups of disk media and pictures. Acts like home server. Sometimes still game on it when I just need to be in a quiet room. Can play Palworld which was quite popular recently. My non pc gaming friends think its a good pc. For them to understand I have to tell them that it plays games better than a PS4 Pro.

I don't think it's even a supply issue, DDR2 era stuff just seems stupidly expensive for no reason. I've bought older DDR era parts and even old 486 stuff for less. It's like a few people listed the stuff at inflated prices and everybody just does the same trying to match what they see the other stuff listed at.

I had a LGA 775 P35 System last year with an cheap Q9300 and 4*2 GB DDR2 RAM at 800Mhz, a HD 7770, 120 GB SSD and Lubuntu. The performance was descent. Kinda. I played Minecraft, older games and Indie games on it. So it can work, but I still would recomend not going further back than the 4th Intel Generation with DDR3 for a daily driver.

Strange, i recently put together an Intel i5-4670k system with 16gb ddr3, GTX780ti, Asrock Z87 Extreme4 MB, all in a nice PowerMac G4 case i converted to use ATX hardware and i've got it running both Windows 10 and Mac OSX Ventura with none of the issues you mention.

The first CPU I bought was the Phenom (pronounced "FEE" nom) II x3 Yes, all 4 cores worked fine. And you need to have the drivers for the sata controller on the install medium

I actually wonder, if you lock the fps to 30 or 60, how bad the stutters would be, thus if somebody had a DDR2 system, they would actually have some possibility to play. Thanks for the video!

I've got a set of OCZ Platinum 4GB DDR2 udimms. 16GB on my Q9550 retro-ish system.

I've had the exact same thing as you've been telling about at the end. In small business I operate, there's no need to upgrade the whole platform for the storage server and a simple website hosted locally. It runs on some old Core 2 Quad, 8 gigs of RAM and... that's it. Works well enough at 1GbE, so why bother upgrading it further than the CPU? I've recently replaced only the CPU in that system. I believe it was from Core 2 Duo E8300 to Core 2 Quad q9500. And I believe this will rock for the next couple of years. And if it won't, well, I have some 775 motherboards lying around, I can just plop that in there and call it a day. When replacing the CPU, I was amazed with how... expensive these ancient chips are. 35 bucks for a 14 year old chip? I can get something like Ryzen 1600 for that price. But then I have to make the effort of replacing basically the whole platform... which isn't economical for the use case at this point.

You can install old OS and applications offline, use is as simple word processor, programing or photo editing using old software or open source free one.

I have a win 10 Q6700 @3.2 with 8gb of DDR2 (2x4gb) / 8gb rx580 (3rd gfx in its life Radeon hd6870 1Gb the days , then GTX650ti 2gb ), sat next to me at this moment it ran 14 hours daily no issues for the last near 20 years i turn it on to update it regularly and it's a backup that came in handy when my old folks laptop went down it stood in for them for a couple of weeks till new laptop was delivered , so its still going strong, (i have quite a number of DDR2 ram sticks kicking about in the box of eternal computer bits for "just in case")

Maybe probably someone might have forgotten to benchmark the an OC C2D E7500. Just maybe. Hey you! Yes, you! You came all the way here and didn't join the Discord server?

I recently picked up a pc with a q6600 and 4gb ddr2 for free. I also put a quadro 600 in it which i got from another system. I think these old systems are great fun to play around with if u get them for free or very little money

I have a 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 server with 28 gigs of ddr2 ecc 800 ram and I still use it as my Minecraft server, works great

Retro builds are influence on the higher prices too Phenom and Core2 are popular options for XP systems or even Vista.

I still have like 3 or 4 am2+ motherboards and CPUs along with ddr2 memory they all still work.

Would be cool to do a WinXP DDR2 build for retro gaming and nostalgia!

I actually have an old 775 system that I got for free around. Just recently I realized that it has DDR3, but it only supports up to 8GB. So I went ahead and picked up two 4GB DDR3 sticks for like 15$, threw in some old 120GB SSD that I also got for free, and I had GTX 660 laying around so I just used that one for GPU part. And yeah, CPU in mine is Q6700. It's still alright today but don't expect any miracles.

I forget how old the Core 2 era is sometimes.

I recently got an old emachines sff PC to use as a parts PC (mostly the PSU), and it's got a celeron 450 (worse conroe with a single core)

It's showing 7gb of ram on the P5B because you have to enable in the bios options under the advanced tab "remap memory feature" I still daily drive my P5B deluxe with a modded s771 works like a charm (but I don't game)

I think the problem of stutter is in default windows( better to use 10 ltsc with revi os modification, it uses only 2 gigabytes of ram and has much less opened programs and unneeded services). Also windows prefetch could help if sata is not fast enough😊

On the setup screen hit shift f10 and use diskpart to format the disk mbr then it should work

The biggest concern is the operations which these chips cannot do for DX12/Vulkan/openGL libraries. This is why you might get stuttering

Could be a usb stick support thing... old computers used to install from CDROM so USB boot was flakey at best... just pop in a CDROM and window install disk to try and install from there...

Wish I still had some ddr2 lying around, need it for an Atom build

I wouldn't use any of that older hardware for a modern windows 10 daily driver. Would use them for a vista or win 7 era appropriate gaming machine behind a good security system and online going online for essentials.

"T" in 840T stands fot "Thuban" - full, 6 core AMD Phenom X6 die with 2 disabled cores :)

I have trouble running BioShock infinite smoothly too and I have a 5800x and 3060ti. I spent hours trying to find work arounds for the stutter and could only just get it bearable to play.

I still have my old Phenom II/DDR3 system parts lying around.... My work PC STILL has my old ATI 4870 512MB card, that I used to run in crossfire with its twin... almost a decade ago.

Shoud i sell my DDR2 ram now or wait to became as oblosete as DDR1?

in Romania these cpus are being sold for 2-3 bucks also ram is next to free

I have an AM2 system with Phenom II x4 960T and 16GB of DDR2. Yep, DDR2, not DDR3. While it is just 800MHz and definitely outdated, but it's still 16GB, which is a ton for DDR2. Works just fine for plenty of things, though I had to mix the sticks around to get them all to work together since I didn't buy them in one kit of 4 by 4GB. Speaking to those hopeful to get 16GB of DDR2 on LGA 775 - you can't. The best you can get for LGA 775 is 8GB of DDR2.

I can see DDR2 being useful in applications where top performance isn't all that important, such as emulation of retro hardware (up to PSX generation, maybe PS2 if you push it) or stuff like home file server that is supposed to be only accessible from the LAN and as such doesn't need huge amount of RAM or great CPU because of how few people would be accessing it.

Are you sure you had the AMD motherboard SSD as the primary BIOS Boot priority? No joking, that's what usually causes windows installer to run into MBR issues and then throw that error.

I have an old X300 Thinkpad, I don't really have any use for it, the battery is dead, and the 1.8 ssd is only 60gigs, but it works for light web browsing running some unsupported Ubuntu LTS, and is fun to play with. So I'm considering maybe replacing DDR2 2x1gb sodimms with 2x2gb 800 sodimms, equivalent to about 5.5$ each. For shits and giggles(1.2ghz dualcore with 8gb ram sounds kinda ironic) I decided to check the price for 4gb 800 sodimms and... 38$ per stick. For the price of 2 of these sticks I can buy a set of new DDR4 2x16gb 3200 16-18-18-38 G.Skills. Some prices refuse to go down, and seems like no giggles will be going on.

grab a 1075t phenom 2 and watch it is soooo much better

Most of the systems I use are DDR2 based and I have no problems with it running windows 11 and doing some light gaming here and there. No it’s definitely not ideal for high end gaming but for normal everyday use it’s kind-of a waste to use anything newer when you can get these so cheap or even free. It’s a shame people think these systems are just obsolete junk when that’s the furthest thing from the truth. As for DDR3 My boyfriend has a DDR3 i7 3770 system that he can basically play any game he wants on including cyberpunk 2077.

Man, I'm watching this video on Core 2 Quad Q9300 engineering sample OC to 3.0GHz. 8GB of DDR2. Talk about e-waste 😅 As for not being able to install fresh OS to SSD. Did you clear your SSD completely? It needs to be clear(empty) as new drive. You can do that by wiping the ssd. Execute Secure Erase command on that drive. OR, you can clear your drive of any previous formatting by going to Diskpart: commands are as follows. List Disk -> Select Disk * (where * is your drive number!) -> Clean.

I am using amd x3 phonei processor with 4gb ram.. clock speed 2.1ghz.. work fine many years no issues only one time power supply change..i dont even knew which year i buy.. may be its working 13 year.. more then

DDR2 is great. I have a old quadcore and i have crammed the motherboard full to 16gb DDR2 333mhz that was lying around and just happened to be of same speed but from different sources. Old and obsolete otherwise but works wonders in this use. I have also added old HDD disks so the machine in the living room acts as a the backup machine for all machines elsewhere in the house. it has backup sync software that periodicaly tests if other machines are online and if so attempts to mirror the contents from certain folders from the to those big HDD disks. And since i have several it is easy to make backups of backups too so all in all my files are pretty secure except fire (and even then i would have some stuff in the cloud). Using the machine itself is great now. Several browsers can be open, steam games and gamepads attached and big TV since it's living room HTPC machine. I will likely exchange the quadcore some day with the oldest whatever i get from somewhere else but at the moment it works really well.

you should try a dual socket lga771 and test more games (gta v , the witcher 2015, sottr, etc) to see how 8 cores from that era handle them

That pagefile must be doing god's work - honestly instead of buying DDR2 RAM at this point, it's almost worth considering some way of perhaps using PCIe Gen 4 SSDs at this point. We're talking same peak transfer rates lmao

The fact you say Phenom the way you do makes me feel so old 😢

i used some parts i had l,aying around to build an i7 3770 system recently for taking to friends houses for lan and i think this is about as far back as you can go to run modern titles on a budget machine , ram was like 30 quid for 16 gig ddr3 wich came new in box (i didn't know you could still get new ddr3 ) if hadn't had a motherboard for it id have gone with an am4 and an apu but i also had a 750 ti i wasn't using and i figure when i upgrade my main rig it can have the 1060 in it , kinda wish i had more excuses to build with this older hardware as it is a lot of fun

its the same just different print or die sizes to get more memory, and better quality for higher clock speeds. until you get into quad channel xmp and buffered ram

I remember some of these games running much better on an rx 470, though I had the xeon version of a core 2 quad, the stuttering might be from your gpu being way too powerful for it

I just recently obtain an Optiplex 755 with 1 GB ram and a Core 2 Duo.. I replaced the CPU with a Q9650 and tried my Win 10 SSD.. I was thinking of buying more DDR2 rams.. no gpu.. might just use it for linux.

I went to service centre and showed them my Kingston DDR 2 1066mhz 2x2gb hyper X with lifetime warranty and they refunded me 33.5 SGD dollars.

Not posting nor getting into the BIOS usually involves the CMOS battery, in my experience.

to get it to install windows on try changing the boot to ide instead of sata and should run on sata drives

Those old computers would still be usable if only they weren't so power hungry.

I use the same set up cpu and ram, sinds september 2008, works fine 4k play back, system went from xp- vista-windows7-windows10, next year it will be replaced after 16 years, it’s done well

Which version of windows were you trying to install? If it was windows 11 it will not install on TCPM chips below 2.0 without registry hacks. BypassTPMCheck , D-word 32, 1 BypassRAMCheck, D-word 32, 1 BypassSecureBootCheck, D-word 32, 1

Have you disabled virtualization, power saving, and cool and quiet features? To this day I still daily drive a 1090t with 8gb of ram. Disabling some features really stabilizes performance. Older single core games go from 20-30fps to 120-180fps, more modern games between 50-80fps. The difference is massive. Fortnite for example ran at 80-85 with some dips and I locked it at 75fps to keep it smooth. Cities Skylines is mostly single threaded but keeps above 30fps. Even non games like Excel or Chrome ran way smoother with the mentioned features disabled. Yes the system shows it's age, but it puts a hell of a fight. I even dare to do video editing (although the actual rendering in 4k takes a very long time and 20-30gb of swap).

This would run like new if you were using Debian with XFCE