According to The Register, motherboard makers are still releasing new products for memory standards many assumed were obsolete. Gigabyte recently introduced the B450M H ARGB and B550 X-Eagle for AMD's AM4 platform, both with DDR4 slots, plus a B760M Aorus Elite for Intel. DDR4 first appeared in 2014, and DDR5 only reached mainstream PCs in 2021. In China, vendors such as Huananzhi and Machinist are selling new DDR3 motherboards for Intel's LGA-2011 socket, aimed at roughly 15-year-old Xeon E5 processors.
These releases are partly a response to current price rises and component shortages driven by large-scale, cloud-based LLM training, The Register says. That context makes older, depreciated corporate hardware more appealing. The publication also argues that wiping a commercial OS and installing Linux reveals two things: you don't need the latest hardware, and older PCs often work better with open-source systems than new ones do, because recent hardware tends to have proprietary drivers and limited documentation.
Microsoft's Windows 11 hardware requirements exclude an entire generation of otherwise capable machines, The Register contends, and the security benefits don't justify that exclusion. For users who don't need high-powered local LLMs or very high frame rates, second-hand kit is more usable than ever.