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Best Motherboard for a Large Memory System?
kimanaw writes "Due to a particular infrastructure need, and increasing OS support for 64 bitness, I'm looking into building a large memory server box (at least 16 gigs, possibly up to 64 gigs, probably config'ed into a big ramdisk). I only need a single CPU, and just minimal disk; most prebuilt systems w/ large memory seem to focus on more CPus and big RAID, all of which (over)inflate the pricetag. I've searched several websites (including Tom's Hardware), and I've googled, but can't seem to locate any commercially available AMD MBs supporting more than 4 sticks of RAM, or 4 gigs. Have any Slashdotters built a big-RAM server? Any pointers, hints, and tips much appreciated."
You might want to get 2GB DIMMs. I have never seen any that worked reliably, but I also haven't looked at them in about a year. Get some and burn them in with memtest and see what happens. As for 8-DIMM motherboards, check out something from Tyan. Since you say you don't need that much CPU power, you could load up a Tyan Thunder board with two Opteron 240 CPUs for rather little money (or, a very small amount compared to what the 16GB of memory is going to cost you). If you seriously need 64GB of memory, the only PC system I've seen with that much are the HP ProLiant DL585, DL740, and DL760 machines. These are very expensive, especially once loaded with 64GB of memory.
Actually, a well-tuned high-end database typically doesn't need to be completely in-memory to get 98% of the speed of one on a ramdisk.
For example, let's say that you've got 15 gbytes of raw data on db2/oracle/informix, as well as 4-8 gbytes of memory.
First step is storage: don't use raid-5 (requires extra writes), instead you'll want something like raid-10. Then ideally get 28-56 or so drives, and you can spread data, indexes, logs, and tempspace across all drives. Obviously 15k rpm ultra320 drives with a caching controller would be best (if you can't afford fibre).
Next make sure that your memory is tuned right - multiple gbytes set aside for buffering, sorting, asynchronous agents, etc. With these databases it's easy to ensure that all of your indexes are always in memory, that all writes to disk are asynchronous, and that most sorts are in-memory. The buffering should ensure that 98% or so of your disk access actually hits the bufer instead of the disk.
Given the above scenario a database running on a ramdisk could be faster - what? 0-5%? And in return for that possible speed increase it'll cost more and lack the reliability of the disk-based database. Probably not a good deal.
The 2G sticks have been out for about a year now. 4G sticks are what's new.
:D *Kidding* I could be wrong though. :)
Apple doesn't list higher then 8G, because that is what they tested. 4G sticks will most likely also work. There is really no reason why they wouldn't.
"All that RAM." "far More data than you have resources to process." *LOL* It's safe to say that you don't work with video, nor as an artist. Are you working on a 386SX.
I have over a Terabyte of HD and my system handles it just fine. My 7 to 8 minute video jobs export single video files that average about 12Gigs. If I had 16GB of RAM and AEPro supported it, even with that Much RAM I would still need to "purge it all" every so often. I also generally run most of my pro apps at the same time since I need to jump between them. When they support 64-bit memory, my 5 G of RAM will not be enough. I'm upgrading to Tiger since it allows 64-bit memory support for apps now and CS2 will take advantage of that, at least on the Mac. I'll be allocating 4 gigs of RAM into it, since some of the poster illustrations I work on have exceeded over 3.5G in RAM (And since PS could only see 2G, it had to rely on scratch disk(s) to make up the difference.). That would only leave 1G for everything else, so needless to say I'll also be upgrading my RAM when I buy Tiger to more then 8G.
What I work with is peanuts compared to what a friend of mine does. He works with satellite imagery and a small plot of land can easily exceed over a Terabyte for one image.
Anyways, 16G of RAM is nothing with current comps and I bet that in about 4 years you'll probably have at least 6Gs in your system. Go back just a few years and 1G of RAM was considered more then most peeps would ever need or use.