high memory build

[Bondy3]

My wife wants me to build her a new workstation desktop computer,

 

I'm not sure exactly what she is going to be doing with it, but she said her work is very memory intensive and she wants 128gb minimum (and she would prefer 256gb, but I am pretty sure thats going into the server side of things).  

 

I don't think her work is CPU intensive, or GPU intensive,  though id like to give her the ability to run some games,  I feel like a giant memory house that cant do anything else is kinda worthless

 

anyone have an idea about how to go about starting a build like this?  it feels weird to me, ()

[Thue500]

What is her work since she needs all that ram?

[HeyKitty]

3 minutes ago, Thue500 said:

What is her work since she needs all that ram?

Also curious. 32GB is a TON for most standards.

[Bondy3]

6 minutes ago, Thue500 said:

What is her work since she needs all that ram?

Shes a social media Guru and she needs to have a lot of twitter tabs open in Internet Explorer...

 

 

[Bondy3]

5 minutes ago, HeyKitty said:

Also curious. 32GB is a TON for most standards.

shes a developer who works with Niche databases for a Fortune 500 company and always is crunching a ton of data that should probably be done on the cloud but there are rules about keeping the data physically separate from the cloud because its sensitive...   

[Thue500]

If that is all dont get more than 16gb at most 8gb is also enough.

[chiwas]

1 minute ago, Bondy3 said:

Shes a social media Guru and she needs to have a lot of twitter tabs open in Internet Explorer...

 

 

Its cheaper to use Chrome or Firefox then buy 128GB or RAM

[HeyKitty]

1 minute ago, Bondy3 said:

shes a developer who works with Niche databases for a Fortune 500 company and always is crunching a ton of data that should probably be done on the cloud but there are rules about keeping the data physically separate from the cloud because its sensitive...   

how is it RAM intensive and not also CPU/GPU to crunch numbers???

[Bondy3]

wow,  was kidding about  "Social Media Guru"     (is that even a real thing?)     She has 64gb currently and its a bottleneck for her work

[paddy-stone]

Either she's a rocket scientist or she's got Gigabytes and Megabytes mixed up, LOL

 

 

[Bondy3]

1 minute ago, HeyKitty said:

how is it RAM intensive and not also CPU/GPU to crunch numbers???

Honestly I dont know.  but she told me memory is her bottleneck.  I Dont know exactly what her work entails.   its not relevent to my original question though.    I know she has 64GB and its currently a bottleneck though...

[paddy-stone]

I seriously doubt that 64GB RAM would be a bottleneck, could be wrong but don'tthink so. I think it's more likely the storage is the bottleneck and investing in faster SSD would be better... or at least doing that first and seeing how she goes than investing in another 64-192GB RAM

[Bondy3]

11 minutes ago, paddy-stone said:

I seriously doubt that 64GB RAM would be a bottleneck, could be wrong but don'tthink so. I think it's more likely the storage is the bottleneck and investing in faster SSD would be better... or at least doing that first and seeing how she goes than investing in another 64-192GB RAM

Im also looking into that option,   the cost of buying a ton of RAM is really high and if fast SSD storage will work,  Id much prefer that

[paddy-stone]

1 hour ago, Bondy3 said:

Im also looking into that option,   the cost of buying a ton of RAM is really high and if fast SSD storage will work,  Id much prefer that

Yeah, I just looked into how much it'd cost for 256GB of DDR4 RAM in 16GB sticks... it's £1300 approx just for the RAM, lol, plus you'd need a server mobo to be able to even handle that much 16x16GB, so then you'd want a serious CPU to crunch all that data too. You can pick up enghineering samples of like 2675 xeon which is 16 cores for about £350 or so, so that's not bad at all... but personally I'd rather go with the CPU first and maybe 4-8 sticks of RAM, which would be DDR3 so might be more costly even at the moment, haven't checked prices for that. But at least you could either use a normal 2011 mobo or buy a server mobo+ case etc in case of bottlenecks in future and have greater expandability.

[Bondy3]

1 minute ago, paddy-stone said:

Yeah, I just looked into how much it'd cost for 256GB of DDR4 RAM in 16GB sticks... it's £1300 approx just for the RAM, lol, plus you'd need a server mobo to be able to even handle that much 16x16GB, so then you'd want a serious CPU to crunch all that data too. You can pick up enghineering samples of like 2675 xeon which is 16 cores for about £350 or so, so that's not bad at all... but personally I'd rather go with the CPU first and maybe 4-8 sticks of RAM, which would be DDR3 so might be more costly even at the moment, haven't checked prices for that. But at least you could either use a normal 2011 mobo or buy a server mobo+ case etc in case of bottlenecks in future and have greater expandability.

yeah I made my OP without too much forthought,  Ive been pricing out how much 256GB of memory cost and it looks like its $1600 USD or so..  plus the surver mobo, CPU, etc.  I feel like im getting too into heavy hitting stuff.  Im gonna have a talk with her about how much she really needs the memory and if its really worth the cost.  I have a feeling its not

[Evanair]

One thing to check, have her work load open and check the actual RAM usage, as well as the page file usage.  Windows will use a page file when there is still ram available (very annoying...).

Adding 2 SSD's (one for the system, another for just the page file) could improve the system at a lot lower cost than buying ECC memory, Xeon, and (possibly) a new motherboard.

[paddy-stone]

As above (if you can), was going to mention it earlier and then forgot... would be really helpful and also maybe prove the point for or against needing more RAM to check the task manager during "high workload" times and that should give you an idea of how close to using that 64GB she is at the time... plus the CPU workload as a bonus. She must already have a pretty decent setup with regards to RAM to be able to have 64GB, must be rocking an x79/x99 or something similar to be able to have that much I'm guessing, unless it's a fairly new build anyway and it's just not up to the job???  If this is true, about the x79/x99  2011 mobo, you could get away with throwing a xeon in there as I said earlier and just beef up the RAM amount (if needed).. that'd save you a fair bit of money just there if you can source a beefy chip like the e5 2675 16 core for approx $400 or so.. it sounds like it'd really help with the number crunching and also multi-tasking to boot would be a breeze

[paddy-stone]

Just FYI, but if you have either the x79/x99 chipset you should be good, in fact if it's x79 you're golden, you can pick up something like the e5-2660 for as little as £80 I've seen them... just harder to come by an x79 mobo these days. If it's x99 then most of the e5 series v3 are good to go in there.

 

I am no expert at all... just have been researching for maybe beefing up my army of PC hardware a bit