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I know of motherboards which will allow both DDR3 & DDR4 formats to be used, this would allow me to use DDR3 for a time, then in the future upgrade to DDR4.

My real question is, what motherboards are currently available in this format? And what are the the trade-offs for this flexibility?

nickson104
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    I wouldn't recommend a DDR3/DDR4 board, if one exists already. Boards that use two memory types are almost always very low quality due to the need of twice the amount of components. Also, DDR4 in mid to low-end setups currently provides almost no improvement and in a lot of cases is worse with many tasks. – Adam Oct 18 '15 at 09:36
  • What cpu do you have/are you looking at? – DJMcMayhem Oct 18 '15 at 15:00
  • @Adam thank you for the insight, I wasn't aware of that drawback, I was hoping to make bridging the jump a bit less painful. – nickson104 Oct 19 '15 at 07:10
  • @DJMcMayhem I currently have an AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 850 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.3GHz. However I am planning to upgrade to an I5, hopefully the new skylake (6600?). – nickson104 Oct 19 '15 at 07:12
  • @nickson104 If you are planning to upgrade to an i5, and skylake, check out the i5 6600k. I am not sure if this is overkill for your computer though, what do you plan on using it for, and why are you upgrading. You could get a huge deal of help from me if you could specify what you plan on using your computer for. If you find your computer 'sluggish' upgrading RAM may not help. Consider upgrading to an SSD instead. – Rubydesic Oct 21 '15 at 19:51
  • @RubyJunk Mostly games, however I may end up using VS at home some day, certainly I plan on trying to learn Unity and Blender/Maya/3DS. I will edit the question and place my current specs in. – nickson104 Oct 22 '15 at 07:11
  • @nickson104 You do not really need to upgrade to DDR4 or skylake. It may be possible to return the RAM if you don't want it, or you can just buy a Z97 board and a Devil's Canyon CPU. I can't really write an answer, because recommending specs would not be 'answering the question' and I would get a bunch of downvotes :P – Rubydesic Oct 23 '15 at 00:50
  • @RubyJunk I am leaning towards a devils canyon now, following the advice that boards supporting both ddr3 and 4 are substandard. I wanted skylake and DDR4 primarily for future proofing. I agree with your statement, recommending specs is bad form. I asked the question more to discuss the motherboards rather than what I require, the question is valid regardless of reason, otherwise I would delete it myself as off topic – nickson104 Oct 23 '15 at 07:05
  • @nickson104 I don't think that skylake provides that much 'future-proofing' anyway. When you upgrade, it's probably going to make sense to get a new motherboard, regardless of whether you use Z170 or Z97. – Rubydesic Oct 23 '15 at 11:32
  • @nickson104 Just FYI: build review questions are off-topic here - please don't recommend people move that kind of question here if you can avoid it. Thanks :) – ArtOfCode Jan 27 '16 at 17:26

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