motherboards that support a lot of ram

[TheShiz]

since the best edition of vista will support 16 gigs of ram I think, how soon will we see motherboards that can handle that kind of memory? and I'm wondering if vista will actually make use of it, how awesome would a computer run that actually made use of such a ridiculous amount of ram?

 

[Peter]

Any AMD64 machine can handle up to 2 gigs per DIMM, Opterons even 4*. There are dual-opteron boards with eight DIMM sockets per CPU. These let you populate up to 32 GiB.

* However, thanks to 1-gigabit DDR chips being insanely expensive, you'll stop at half as much in practice.

 

[jlbenedict]

The motherboard in my signature supports 8GB

I seriously doubt any of us on Anandtech could utilize or make use of 16GB of memory

 

[Steve]

Iwill DK88

 

[Kakumba]

pretty much all AM2 mobos support 16 gigs. which is just crazy, its gonna be at least 2 or 3 years before we even start thinking about that for most of even the users here. But I have no doubt that with every new Windows OS, we will get closer and closer to needing that much ram.

 

[BucsMAN3K]

Originally posted by: Kakumba
pretty much all AM2 mobos support 16 gigs. which is just crazy, its gonna be at least 2 or 3 years before we even start thinking about that for most of even the users here. But I have no doubt that with every new Windows OS, we will get closer and closer to needing that much ram.

If you mean like even the hardest of gaming or application performance, I doubt 16 gigs would be of much use for a PC for 10-20 years, or whenever they have a game in which you can play a game within the game, watch an HDDVD on a virtual TV in the game, and stream Porn on a virtual PC within the game all at the same while blowing up Skynet.

 

[Peter]

Heard that before, many times over during the past 20 years ...

Trust me, software IS going to make use of what the 64-bitness brings us. There are plenty of high end applications that starve for more RAM.

 

[krotchy]

Originally posted by: Peter
Heard that before, many times over during the past 20 years ...

Trust me, software IS going to make use of what the 64-bitness brings us. There are plenty of high end applications that starve for more RAM.

I agree, hardware is only as useful as the software that runs it. In fact, hardware is almost always the limiting factor as to what a programmer can do. If we had a computer that ran 1000x faster than todays standards, a programmer could easily bottleneck it with some crazy algorhythms.

Just look at Oblivion. Before it came out, 2 7900 GTX's SLI'd could dominate anything and everything. Poof Oblivion = Stress test. Most software manuafacturers program around what they think the end user will be running. Release oblivion in its current state 5 years ago and no one would ever buy it cuz no one can come close to running it.