ITX Motherboard RAM limit question.

[Tom_W]

Wasn't sure if I should put this here or New Builds & Planning. Not a new build though more of a technical question on compatibility / upgrading so decided here was probably more appropriate.

I am currently running with 16Gb of RAM but am starting to bounce off the top end of that (blame city skylines and mods). My motherboard (asus P8Z77-I deluxe) lists 16Gb as it's limit, does anyone know if this is a hard limit or just a marketing limit based on max DIMM capacity at the time?
It's an ITX board so only has 2 DIMM sockets but it is duel channel, the larger boards with 4 sockets are also duel channel but list a limit of 32Gb. It would be a fairly expensive experiment to grab a couple of higher capacity sticks to test. So I was wondering if anyone knew if the RAM limit was listed at half that of the full sized board based on max size consumer ram at the time, and since the chipset appears to be capable of 16Gb per channel I should be fine sticking a pair of 16Gb sticks in there, or if the sockets are limited to 8Gb and I'm stuck with a max of 16 unless I can find a full sized motherboard and rebuild in a larger case (or update/ upgrade everything but that might get a little pricey at the moment).

[Kilrah]

You didn't list the rest of your system, especially CPU...

But according to Wikipedia

 

Quote

The DDR3 standard permits DRAM chip capacities of up to 8 gigabits (Gbit), and up to four ranks of 64 bits each for a total maximum of 16 gigabytes (GB) per DDR3 DIMM. Because of a hardware limitation not fixed until Ivy Bridge-E in 2013, most older Intel CPUs only support up to 4-Gbit chips for 8 GB DIMMs 

Given the mobo it seems your CPU is older than that so likely won't support 16GB DIMMs.

Not to mention they are rare and expensive, and it wouldn't make much sense spending >3 times what the same amount of DDR4 costs into an obsolete platform, makes more sense to replace the whole thing, you can probably find a newer used mobo/CPU just for the difference in RAM price. 

[jaslion]

15 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

You didn't list the rest of your system, especially CPU...

But according to Wikipedia

 

Given the mobo it seems your CPU is older than that so likely won't support 16GB DIMMs.

Not to mention they are rare and expensive, and it wouldn't make much sense spending >3 times what the same amount of DDR4 costs into an obsolete platform, makes more sense to replace the whole thing, you can probably find a newer used mobo/CPU just for the difference in RAM price. 

This and you can get a 250$ ryzen upgrade that is better than anything that is on their old platform (50 ish more for 32gb of ram).

[Tom_W]

Thanks for the help.
Yeah, the cpu is older (3770k). Not sure what my head was doing thinking ram went through the chipset, I'm going to claim lack of morning coffee. Also turns out the 32Gb kit I had spotted at a reasonable(ish) price on pc part picker is some incorrectly listed DDR4 ram so wouldn't have got far with that anyway.

[Dredgy]

Will depend on CPU and chipset support. I have 64GB RAM (2x 32GB sticks) on a Ryszen 3950x on an Asrock ITX Board.