ROG Maximus IX Apex supports terabytes of DDR3 RAM?

[Pheelo]

Is it true that the ROG Maximus IX Apex supports terabytes of ram by letting you mount an m.2 ssds in a ddr3 ram slot?
Because thats how I understand it.. It should be said english is not my first language so I might be wrong.

Source: https://rog.asus.com/articles/maximus-motherboards/press-release-rog-unveils-latest-maximus-ix-and-strix-gaming-motherboards/

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[Electronics Wizardy]

Its a m.2 slot, not a dimm slot. It won't be used as ram. Nothing special about it, other than its using a dimm connector riser board.

[Energycore]

That slot might be keyed like a DDR3 slot, but it's connected to the PCH via the PCI-E bus. So it's just a fancy way of hooking up an M.2 Drive but it won't be much faster than a normal M.2 slot (no more than 2x as fast)

[ThinkWithPortals]

I seriously doubt that.

[Mira Yurizaki]

It says right there in the page:

Quote

The third slot (DDR3) is wired directly to the PCH and is partnered by a riser card named DIMM.2.

 

As the name cheekily implies, DIMM.2 is used for mounting M.2 drives.  The card features an M.2 slot on either side, capable of housing two drives in all sizes (up to 22110). An additional advantage of using a DDR3 slot is that it permits users to mount a memory cooler directly over the drives, helping to reduce temperatures. The riser card also features two embedded thermal sensors that can be mapped to the motherboard’s fan headers to keep noise levels in check. Topping it all off, a physical failsafe in the form of a small metal bracket straddles the DIMM.2 slot, preventing accidental use of DDR3 memory modules.

This means it's not part of the memory system. It's just using the DIMM slot to connect the M.2 drives.

 

Even if it could be used as RAM, it's horribly slow. NVMe is 2GB/s with about 70uSec latency (~13.5K IOPS) for 4K transfers. This is compared to DDR4-2166 with a bandwidth of 2,166GB/s and a latency of less than 50ns, give or take. You're looking at a 1000x slowdown in both bandwidth and latency if you use an NVMe drive as RAM.

 

EDIT: I did a bit of looking around and found that the Samsung 960 Pro does get 26K 4K IOPS, that puts it about ~35uS latency and still horribly slow.

[Falconevo]

Its so an m.2 device it can be cooled by a memory cooler

[Pheelo]

Would it not have made more sense then if they:

Removed a pcie slot and replaced it with 2 ddr4 ram slots, so you could use the ram for storage since they are faster?

Thats 32 gb crazy fast storage.