Cheap DDR3 RAM rumored to spark demand to bring back old motherboards, as Colorful mulls Intel H81 resurrection

You might well be considering cost-cutting measures if you are in the market for a new PC right now, but odds are you won't be doing anything as drastic as switching back to use DDR3 RAM.

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However, there is apparently some demand for the older memory standard now - thanks to the RAM crisis - to the point where Colorful could be set to produce old motherboards that are built for DDR3.

Or so a post on Channel Gate claims (as highlighted by VideoCardz), although given the source, I'd load this up with more than the usual amount of skepticism.

We're told that Colorful is planning to 're-procure' supplies for DDR3 motherboards, and these are "expected to arrive soon, to alleviate the current supply pressure". Early in May, the theory is that the company could start producing some new motherboards based on the Intel H81 chipset (with DDR3 support), such is the situation - albeit this will be a case of "very limited" production runs as you might imagine.

Now, while demand is increasing, this is still likely a relatively niche set of buyers - and not so much about consumers, but businesses looking for cheap office PCs. (Budget models are becoming increasingly difficult to find with the sharp increase in DDR4 pricing - and of course don't even talk about DDR5). Or indeed the server market, because large quantities of (used) DDR3 memory can be had very cheaply.

You would, of course, need to use an old Intel CPU with these PCs, too. If you look on the likes of AliExpress, there are already H81 motherboard bundles with DDR3 RAM and Haswell (Intel 4th-gen) processors for not much more than $100 (with 16GB of memory plus a Core i5).

It'll definitely be interesting to see if Colorful really does start cranking out old-but-new (or new-but-old?) DDR3 motherboards off its assembly lines in the near future.