It might be more lucrative to use it instead of selling it at a markup
The current PC hardware landscape is unfriendly to say the least. The DRAM price hike has made building a new PC basically untenable, and many are turning to the used market to at least try and offset costs a little bit. If you’ve made an upgrade to your system recently, or have older RAM lying around, you might be tempted to jump into the used market to make a buck, and while I wouldn’t blame anyone for that, there are other ways to use your extra RAM that don’t involve selling it.
Start a home lab
You already have the most expensive part
While RAM prices have skyrocketed, most other parts have stayed relatively steady in terms of their price, at least for now. Components that use DRAM will go up in price naturally. However, the parts you need to start a home lab, both new and used, are still totally reasonable. You already have the most expensive part of the build if you plan to use off-the-shelf desktop components.
There really has never been a better time to start a home lab. A home lab lets you experiment with virtualization, containers, automation, and self-hosting in a way that’s impossible to replicate on a single daily-driver PC. You can break things, rebuild them, and learn how real systems behave without risking your main machine.
If you already run a home lab, slotting in your spare RAM — if compatible, of course — can give your setup a little extra juice. Home lab workloads are almost always memory-bound before they’re CPU-bound.
