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Tech enthusiast finds $12,000 stack of RAM in their garage — work let them keep an old server stuffed with 1,920GB of DDR4 However, these registered ECC DDR4 sticks will need to find a new home in a suitable Xeon, Epyc, or Threadripper system. A computing enthusiast has shared images of a fat stack of DDR4 RAM sticks that they found at home. VastOption8705 told other tech fans on Reddit that they “found 10k worth of RAM sitting in my garage.” We count 30 sticks of DDR4-2666, and three sticks shown separately are all 64GB modules. If they are all 64GB modules, that number of sticks would add up to 1,920GB of RAM… How did this huge amount of RAM end up in VastOption8705’s garage? The story goes that the Redditor was allowed to keep an old server from their workplace. Such 'generosity' isn’t unheard of, and it might have actually saved the company some recycling fees. Is server DDR4 useful? Numerous comments on the Reddit post jokingly pitch for RAM stick donations. But they might be barking up the wrong tree. Looking more closely at the sticks, where the labels are clearly readable, reveals that they are Samsung 64GB DDR4 ECC registered DIMMs (RDIMMs). These kinds of RAM sticks are commonly used in servers built around Intel Xeon, AMD Epyc, or AMD Threadripper platforms. Sadly for their market value and the folks on Reddit hoping for some spare RAM, they aren’t consumer PC friendly. Even if you have a DDR4-supporting motherboard, these ECC RDIMMs will be both physically and electrically incompatible with your home creator/gaming PC. Pricing and the Australia question A quick poke around eBay U.S. listings shows that a single 64GB DDR4-2666 stick like those shown can be bought for between $350 and $425. So, we could roughly value the 30 sticks at $12,000 if a price of $400 per stick were achieved. The OP’s touted $10K valuation wasn’t far off. But if VastOption8705 lives in Australia, as they seem to, and guesstimated the value in Australian dollars, AU$10,000 currently equates to ~US$7,200 – quite low. If you have spare RAM in your garage, don't share your address on public forums. The best I could find is a pair of 8GB DDR4 SO-DIMMs in my drawer. I also had some 30-pin SIMMs, SDRAM, PowerMac ROMs, and DDR3 modules probably worth just pennies, despite the RAMpocalypse. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. - alexw404 I wouldn't mind grabbing 8 sticks of 64 GB ECC registered DDR4 RAM, but I prefer 3200 ones.Reply - PEnns ReplyS58_is_the_goat said:I found a hard drive in a landfill with 8000 bitcoins... Thank you!!! I have been looking for my Bitcoin wallet for months!! 😊 - Razzi16 That is a VERY clickbaity misleading title.Reply He didn't just 'find' them there, he would have PUT them there himself. - abufrejoval Back in the old days, when my ex-employer was still running things nearly exclusively in corporate data centers, we had piles upon piles of ECC RAM sticks from decomissioned machines (running non-virtualized workloads) and I quite often had them put into same generation VM servers, I was using in a research lab farm. With DDR3 on Sandy and Ivy Bridge quad channel they'd go to 192GB and on DDR4 with Broadwell they'd reach 512GB (quad), 768GB with Skylakes (hexa) using registered DIMMs.Reply Anyhow, using those DIMMs for my home lab PCs typically didn't work, because that's where Intel drew the line: thou shallst not mix business with pleasure without paying extra! (both directions). But underneath it all, Intel itself didn't mind mixing both, they just wanted to keep the economic windfall to themselves. So chipsets like the (workstation) X99 (no RDIMMs) and (server) C612 (only(?) RDIMMs) are internally the same silicon, it's the BIOS and perhaps a fuse or so which makes the difference. And it can't quite be fuses, because there are all these boards on AliExpress, which "blend" or "cross" the lines so carefully drawn up by Intel. They'll take ECC and non ECC UDIMMs or RDIMMs and just run with them, often with quite a lot of overclocking, while Haswell and Broadwell Xeons sell by the kilogram, even the best or originally most expensive ones. These modern boards are supposed to use recycled server chips harvested from cloud servers and feature a very lenient BIOS. Apparently they are sold to internet caffees or gamers, who can't afford the newest stuff. And some of the more modern games really work rather well with relatively slow cores, if they have 8 of them (loading often is 'little'-threaded and thus quite slow). And even if the server RAM tends to be somewhat slower, even the entry level boards offer not just four DIMM sockets, they run them in quad channel mode, duplicating the bandwidth. I keep a 22-core Broadwell Xeon on a X99 mainboard around that features 128GB of DDR4-2133 RAM (ECC UDIMMs, I paid dearly for...): that one didn't accept RDIMMs, when I tried a few years back. But that is an original ASUS workstation board, adhering to market segmentation rules. From the details in those AliExpress listings, those rules don't apply to them. I'm not quite curious enough to purchase one and RDIMMs just to test, but this guy might want to try, because that might make his windfall somewhat more valuable. - abufrejoval Reply As you get older (and have family members with their own sense of order), you'd be surprised how many times you find things, you didn't know were there!Razzi16 said:That is a VERY clickbaity misleading title. He didn't just 'find' them there, he would have PUT them there himself. On top, when the value of those discards changes as much as it does here, that makes it an entirely new thing, psychologically. So yes, you have a point🪙. And it's clickbait for sure: personal computing is in dire straits! But the fact that you read the article proves the point, that old can be the great new these days. At least it may inspire people to go hunting for those scraps and turn them into something useful. - thrus If he sells it that will be used and from a.private seller so would not get the prices of new or even of a company selling it as when you sell as is no returns or refunds it is lower priced. Also it would be added as income since it was from work so taxable. None of us are going to turn down a few grand extra but that is all it would be at the end of the day a few thousand not 10k plus.Reply - MobileJAD I swear if I could somehow get 4 to 8 pieces of DDR4 ECC Reg RAM like this, I'd happily go out and get the cheapest Epyc setup possible and I'd swear that I'd find Something useful for it to run!Reply - Vicecrow @MobileJAD I keep my 14700 with 45w all times. all cores work 2.3 2.4ghz and can max out the rtx 5070.Reply Every time I look at my setup I miss the old xeon broadwell with a $30 cpu give same power than my $240 cpu Only thing I don't wan't back is the energy bill
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