Okay, I guess I don't understand why these new X58 mobos support different maximum memory space among them because don't they basically contain the same chipset? I'm disappointed that the Asus ROG II Extremem only supports a max of 12GB while other brands go all the way to 24GB. What is difference among them (ICs or Chipset-wise) that make them that way?
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Memory: 12GB vs. 24GB
- Thread starter JCNiest5
- Start date
Actually, I don't need that much memory. I'm just asking why the same hardware yet there is limit on one board while not on the others, that's all. Do other brands use different supporting chips that enable their boards to use more memory?
Because....testing costs money? And because no one really gives a crap if it supports more than 12GB?
BanDeodorant
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Are there even 4gb DDR3 sticks out yet?
24GB? What, you want to play GTA IV in max details on 30"? ;P
I doubt they would OC well, besides 4gb sticks would cost quite a bit - 1k per 12 gb for crucial stuff
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT3KIT51272BB1067 and will give you more then 2k for that size of memory.... which more then half won't be used until DDR4 appear in our mobos.
I doubt they would OC well, besides 4gb sticks would cost quite a bit - 1k per 12 gb for crucial stuff
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT3KIT51272BB1067 and will give you more then 2k for that size of memory.... which more then half won't be used until DDR4 appear in our mobos.
Guys. Look, some people buy these boards because they want the fastest and the largest memory pool support possible because they will use them for things besides and beyond gaming. I have a Dell Precision 690 with dual Xeon Quad cores and 32GB of memory because beyond gaming I do a lot of engineering and analysis work and I'm telling you that having that kind of memory is a life saver when you are analyzing large assemblies with 10's of thousands of parts. Can you please stop saying who really needs that kind of memory, because I'm one of those people who does. I plan on building a P6T6 WS Revolution system that is going to get maxed out in ram as a secondary modeling machine. I need this kind of memory pool.
Time. My need is more immediate. However, if something better comes along and it fits the bill I'll use it. The P6T6 WS Revolution fits my bill because I can migrate my already existing hardware to this configuration, add more ram while I'm at it and not lose downtime in transferring date over to it.
it just doesn't make any sense to me. as far as i can see, the only thing you could bring over from the dell is the raid card, the gpus, and the sas drives. if i were a professional who depended on a certain level of parity, data correction, and redundancy the last thing i would try to do is migrate over to a gaming centric platform. good luck though.
Outamyhead
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Do you even need 12GB?
Mine appears to running fine on 6GB, and to the best of my knowledge I don't know any games that would even use all that
BillParrish
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Most of us dont use applications that would, but fire up ProEngineer with a fairly complex assembly model and you will love every byte of ram you can cram onto a board. So us gamers and etc yea, even 6GB is likely more than enough but the photoshop experts, rendering graphic artists and the engineers can put it to work.
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. My Dell Precision 690 is my main working machine. I run Solidworks, Ansys, Pro-E, Cosmosworks, and several other modeling and analysis programs. It's a raid machine and has dual top end quadros running it. That's all this machine does all day long. If it isn't running analysis it's doing something else. It's my primary money maker. I had another machine that I used exclusively for gaming and other stuff, but it was also my backup machine in case something happened to my Dell. I have support for the Dell, and I would hardly be down a couple of days if something happened, but I do need a backup no matter what. That's where the P6T6 WS Revolution would come in. I would retire my backup and create a new backup with this new motherboard, load it up with even more memory than my backup has and migrate as much hardware over to the new backup. That is my intent at the moment.
I easily eat up nearly 30 gigs on some analysis and big assembly work.
bigdogchris
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/thread
But why would you get a board like this for that kind of work?
Get a proper workstation motherboard for that sort of thing, it's stupid to do heavy duty engineering work on a gaming motherboard.
The bottom line is that no gamer will ever use 12 GB, let alone more than that.
And we heard you the first two times. No need to keep hijacking the thread when you didn't even start it, we get it already.
Not trying to hijack. I was just trying to make the point that some people who need that kind of memory, but don't want to spend upwards of $5k or more can do it fairly cheaply. I was also trying to make the further point that as a cheap yet powerful backup, my build would include what I said earlier. If you got it, you wouldn't have needed to reiterate it back to me. You didn't need to be a jerk about it either.
butterfliesrpretty
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You guys are the ones hijacking it. The op asked a valid question. Most of you are repeating the same shit about not needing that much ram. That's not what this thread is about.
Anyways it wasn't that long ago when the idea of having 1gb of ram was considered stupid.
Pointless - there will be no noticeable difference.
stormslayer
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New rule for the forum: no more questions or statements about "why would you need so much ram?"
Some of us use it. Get over the fact that you're not as bad as my bad self unlimited. In fact right now, I'm burning on 10 of my 12gb of ram.
If you do NOT cease and desist on the stupid and expected line of questioning I've highlighted here, I'm going to post in every thread the following message:
Dude. Why are you OCing? Don't you know your computer is fast enough already?
That is all.
sd
Some of us use it. Get over the fact that you're not as bad as my bad self unlimited. In fact right now, I'm burning on 10 of my 12gb of ram.
If you do NOT cease and desist on the stupid and expected line of questioning I've highlighted here, I'm going to post in every thread the following message:
Dude. Why are you OCing? Don't you know your computer is fast enough already?
That is all.
sd
Blazestorm
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There is no point in 24GB if you aren't using it realistically...
I have 8GB and use 7-8GB when editing HD videos... so yea... I can justify 8GB... I'll probably get 12GB when I go I7... but doubt I'd consider 24GB anytime soon...
I have 8GB and use 7-8GB when editing HD videos... so yea... I can justify 8GB... I'll probably get 12GB when I go I7... but doubt I'd consider 24GB anytime soon...
It's amusing that in 2 pages of replies nobody has even attempted to answer your questions.
I'll have a go. There are a couple reasons why it might not support the 24GB:
1) A conscious decision may have been made to differentiate products by reducing the amount of supported memory. This way a premium can be charged for server parts.
2) Increased costs: Supporting more memory takes up more area on the memory controller ,although the memory controller is on the cpu now, so this seems unlikely. For example, the target address in the TLB needs an extra bit per entry in this particular capacity increase (to support 64 bits of byte addressable physical memory the target address would have to almost double in size, this is not insignificant). PCB costs also go up because more address bits are required to address the memory. This is also going to create more difficult timing constraints on the design, further increasing cost. I would think the cost increase is minor, but my experience with memory controller design is limited, so I wouldn't know.
3) The board may not have been qualified for that much memory since they didn't think it was worth the time. No chipset manufacturers that I'm aware of would release a board with unqualified features that were claimed to be supported.
I think 1 and 3 are likely.
Hmmm, I'm going to get 24 gigs when 4 gig sticks become reasonably prced. When rendering big fractals in apo and doing large resolutions in photoshop such quantities of system memory could easily be utilized. If you are only gaming you most probably wont need this within 2-3 years.
stormslayer
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I think no one has answered the original question b/c no one knows. A bunch of people asked the same question about the Asus boards in earlier threads, and no one knew then either, though there was some speculation.
As far as the claim that one should be using a workstation board instead of a gaming board, I've had mixed success. If the gaming board supports the memory, often bios updates, etc. are much more frequent / stable than on some of the cutting edge server boards. I've had supermicros and tyans that have just plain sucked, and some that were great. But, the last two systems I've built have used "gaming" motherboards (an abit ip35 pro and a gigabyte ex58-ud5 with 8 and 12 gb of ram), and they've been at least as good as any workstation board I've used.
The biggest draw of the workstation boards was traditionally the ability to run multiple cpu's, but that's not as essential these days for many apps given there's four cores on one now.
sd
As far as the claim that one should be using a workstation board instead of a gaming board, I've had mixed success. If the gaming board supports the memory, often bios updates, etc. are much more frequent / stable than on some of the cutting edge server boards. I've had supermicros and tyans that have just plain sucked, and some that were great. But, the last two systems I've built have used "gaming" motherboards (an abit ip35 pro and a gigabyte ex58-ud5 with 8 and 12 gb of ram), and they've been at least as good as any workstation board I've used.
The biggest draw of the workstation boards was traditionally the ability to run multiple cpu's, but that's not as essential these days for many apps given there's four cores on one now.
sd
It is becoming annoying. I use ALL of my 12GB on my rig.
I think people are just jealous. If I could I would run 24GB on this machine, there are just no chips yet.
The chipset supports 24GB of RAM. The motherboard does not. At least it was never qualified with 24GB of RAM.
I think for the most part, this is true. Though some people would regardless.
6-12GB is probably more than sufficient for most people. Most of the X58 boards are not designed for the exceptions to that rule. I think people are having a hard time understanding that. Workstation boards that are qualified for that much memory are what is needed for 24GB of RAM or more.
Again, the exceptions to the rule shouldn't be buying a gaming board. If they do, they need to be aware of its limitations.
butterfliesrpretty
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ok then what are the technical differences between a gaming and a server board. That somehow allows it to manage memory better. Specifics please. I see quite a few broad statements in this thread but no specifics.
Maybe we should stop making distinctions between motherboards that are for workstations and for gaming. To me a motherboard is a motherboard and you essentially choose the feature set that suits you best. I don't think there are distinctions between gaming boards and non-gaming boards. Is there? Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.
There are many differences. The biggest? Support.
If I'm building a workstation that's going to be used to make money, and am not going with a pre-built Dell or HP, then it's going to have a Supermicro, maybe an Intel mainboard in it.
A money making rig (aka workstation) should be reliable and stable, and have first class support behind it.
For instance, deal with Asus support, then deal with Dell Premier support. You'll see a huge difference. I've had nothing but absolutely fantastic support from Supermicro, Dell Premier and HP's top level. If a motherboard fails in one of my xw8400's, an HP rep is here within an hour to replace it. Minimal money lost.
Server boards are built to be stable. Enthusiast boards (gaming is a bit of a bad term for them as not all enthusiasts play games.) are designed to overclock. Stability is important, as well so those two goals happen to coincide. Feature set is another difference. Of course the types and sizes of validated memory modules also varies as does the validation of compatible cards. Most boards like the Rampage II Extreme aren't going to be validated with Quadro's or LSI MegaRAIDs. At least not to the degree a Supermicro board will be. Just like the server boards won't be validated for use with XMP compatible memory.
Yeah, there is. As I stated above, the feature set is very different.
A very valid point.
Pure gamers don't. But there are people who may be gamers who also need a top notch workstation. Sadly there aren't many options that can cover everyone's needs.
I already know this and have explained it. I was talking in terms of the hardware, not the support structure surrounding it.
butterfliesrpretty
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That's your opinion and/or the way it's marketed. I want real technical differences... support cmon you gotta be kidding me.
Quadro's, lsi megaraids? So in what way are these gaming motherboards having problems with those? Quadro's historically have been practically the same cards as the gaming versions, usually just a bios difference with different drivers.
For all we know gaming motherboards could be made with better longer lasting components. Just because something is marketed a certain way doesn't mean anything.
In all my years of computing I've only had one motherboard fail (not counting the ones that arrived doa) and that was one I used with a pentium 2 build after I had it 7 years.
Like I said before I remember when 1gb of ram was considered crazy, if people have a valid use for it then so be it, it has been shown that there are uses for it, and just because you think a person should only use that much ram on a server board doesn't mean there's any validity to that argument unless you provide concrete evidence. A possibility of a better support structure.... really thats it?
But we all know this really boils down to reverse epeen, and people not being able to stand that someone has something bigger or better. This needed to be said.
Btw this is all coming from a person that uses 3gb of ram.
stormslayer
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There's a lot of misinformation in this thread.
First, there are differences in support. You can buy great support from Dell or HP. That of itself has nothing to do with the inherent stability or features of a particular board / chipset.
Second, a lot of the workstation boards are not any more stable than a good gaming board. I've owned a variety of supermicros and tyans -- most recently the K8WE (opteron), and that board blew chunks. It was always finicky compared to my gaming board at the time (abit ip35 pro), even though they had the same amount of RAM (8 gb). And Tyan didn't support it in a way that inspired confidence (e.g., infrequent bios updates). Mine was stable b/c I took some time researching components before building, but that's true of every board I build (gaming or otherwise).
You can get hosed w/ a server / workstation board just as easily as a gaming board if you go with the latest chipset, and just b/c they use a chipset that supports more mem, doesn't mean that the mem is going to be stable. There's some additional testing at companies that sell these boards to find compatible ram modules, but they usually select really slow timings to avoid problems.
Note: I don't have a lot of experience with the really expensive server / workstation boards from venders that design their own boards (e.g., Sun). I've always used intel or (more recently) nvidia chipsets.
Third, the attitude that people with gaming boards shouldn't use X amount of ram (where X depends on the troll), even when the chipset / board manu. says it should, is a bit thick. If a mb manu. says a board supports 8 or 12 or 24, then I love to see people review it and see if the board matches up with the spec. For some reason, people get all excited about OCing, but when it comes to ram every thread has a bunch who argue with the poster about "why would you need that much ram?"
Fourth, with the advent of multicore CPUs, one of the biggest reasons for server / workstation boards is dead: multiple CPU support. For many apps, four cores is fine, so there's no need to fiddle w/ a server / workstation board. It's not like they're faster per core...
So the next time someone asks about ram and they're using complete sentences and not drooling on their keyboard, assume they're using the ram. There's a large number of apps that use as much ram as you can throw at them, ranging from stats to video processing to ... Keep from wasting everyone's time and stop posting the silly respones about no one needing that much ram.
sd
First, there are differences in support. You can buy great support from Dell or HP. That of itself has nothing to do with the inherent stability or features of a particular board / chipset.
Second, a lot of the workstation boards are not any more stable than a good gaming board. I've owned a variety of supermicros and tyans -- most recently the K8WE (opteron), and that board blew chunks. It was always finicky compared to my gaming board at the time (abit ip35 pro), even though they had the same amount of RAM (8 gb). And Tyan didn't support it in a way that inspired confidence (e.g., infrequent bios updates). Mine was stable b/c I took some time researching components before building, but that's true of every board I build (gaming or otherwise).
You can get hosed w/ a server / workstation board just as easily as a gaming board if you go with the latest chipset, and just b/c they use a chipset that supports more mem, doesn't mean that the mem is going to be stable. There's some additional testing at companies that sell these boards to find compatible ram modules, but they usually select really slow timings to avoid problems.
Note: I don't have a lot of experience with the really expensive server / workstation boards from venders that design their own boards (e.g., Sun). I've always used intel or (more recently) nvidia chipsets.
Third, the attitude that people with gaming boards shouldn't use X amount of ram (where X depends on the troll), even when the chipset / board manu. says it should, is a bit thick. If a mb manu. says a board supports 8 or 12 or 24, then I love to see people review it and see if the board matches up with the spec. For some reason, people get all excited about OCing, but when it comes to ram every thread has a bunch who argue with the poster about "why would you need that much ram?"
Fourth, with the advent of multicore CPUs, one of the biggest reasons for server / workstation boards is dead: multiple CPU support. For many apps, four cores is fine, so there's no need to fiddle w/ a server / workstation board. It's not like they're faster per core...
So the next time someone asks about ram and they're using complete sentences and not drooling on their keyboard, assume they're using the ram. There's a large number of apps that use as much ram as you can throw at them, ranging from stats to video processing to ... Keep from wasting everyone's time and stop posting the silly respones about no one needing that much ram.
sd