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Best Motherboards With Large RAM Capacity?

Posted by timothy on from the when-more-is-more dept.

cortex writes "I routinely need to analyze large datasets (principally using Matlab). I recently 'upgraded' to 64-bit Vista so that I can access larger amounts of RAM. I know that various Linux distros have had 64-bit support for years. I also typically use Intel motherboards for their reliability, but currently Intel's desktop motherboards only support 8GB of RAM and their server motherboards are too expensive. Can anyone relate their experiences with working with Vista or Linux machines running with large RAM (>8GB)? What is the best motherboard (Intel or AMD) and OS combination for workstation applications in terms of cost and reliability?"

2 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Chipsets by niceone · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To narrow things down a bit, it's not about Motherboards - it's about chipsets. I've only been looking at Intel (AMD don't have the performance right now for music stuff) - Intel's current P35 and X38 chipsets both support 8GB memory max. If you need more then you have to look at one of the Xeon chipsets: the 5000X workstation chipset is the one to look at if you want to be able to run 2 processors (not sure what the equivalent one is for a single processor) - it supports up to 32GB of memory.

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  2. Re:I doubt the need for that much ram. by jacquesm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I love that attitude...

    Some guy comes and asks an honest question. Then people go and tell him that can't be right and then go and give all kinds of suggestions taking into account that he isn't right.

    Let's just for a second assume that the OP has a dataset that large. I can easily imagine it:

    - complicated physics model
    - computational biology problem
    - datamining

    and any one of a thousand other not so trivial computational problems.

    If his 'luck' is the problem is not trivially parallelizable (I hope that's spelled right) then he's got two choices:

    1) try to set up some kind of pipeline
    2) get a single machine that can handle all the data

    Apparently he has chosen for door #2 because that seems to be just about feasible.

    There are some top of the line dell machines that will hold up to 128G of ram, the R900 series.

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