What is the MAX amount of RAM that is possible to put in a pc

[blazerazor]

What is the MAX amount of RAM that can be put in a computer?
Like is 32 gigs of RAM possible?

I have seen P.Norton playing with a computer that had Quake installed in the RAM and it was SWEET.

 

[xtknight]

The max is 2^32 bytes (4 GiB) for a 32-bit computer.

I believe the physical max for most 64-bit CPUs is 2^48 bytes (256 TiB). Check your motherboard to see its supported memory configuration, too.

Keep in mind that no consumer version of 32-bit Windows can address more than around 3G of physical RAM depending on what hardware you use and how much virtual memory space it takes up. 4GiB is the virtual limit for 32-bit, not the physical. A 512MiB graphics card may take some (512MiB?) of the 4G address space because it needs the addresses, too.

Here are the details for 64-bit Windows (basically it can use tons of gigs):

# 8 tebibytes (2^43 bytes) of user mode virtual address space per process. A 64-bit program can use all of this, subject of course to backing store limits on the system. This is a 4096-fold increase over the default 2 gibibyte user-mode virtual address space offered by 32-bit Windows.
# 8 tebibytes (2^43 bytes) of kernel mode virtual address space for the operating system. Again, this is a 4096-fold increase over 32-bit Windows versions. The increased space is primarily of benefit to the file system cache and kernel mode "heaps" (non-paged pool and paged pool).
# Support for up to 128 GiB (Windows XP) or 1 TiB (Windows Server 2003) of RAM.

 

[pcslookout]

I wouldn't mind having 256 TB of system ram! Half for storage, half for memory! Though what motherboard will fit this much ram and how large of memory sticks will you need to buy ?

 

[Hajpoj]

there are server boards with like 8 ram lanes right?

 

[Elias824]

Keep in mind you can also get an iramdrive and have as much as you can fit into one of them. But generally you can put as much as the OS or your mobo will allow. Anyone know what the limit for vista is?

 

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: pcslookout
I wouldn't mind having 256 TB of system ram! Half for storage, half for memory! Though what motherboard will fit this much ram and how large of memory sticks will you need to buy ?

Are you kidding me? Currently, 2GB sticks are about the highest capacity you'd want to buy, after that the price increases too quickly. Now, for servers, they have much higher capacities per stick, and allow for a lot more slots to put memory in, but 256TB is not going to happen in anything but a huge server for a LONG time. For reference, Blue Gene is the world's fastest supercomputer (IIRC, it may be second now) and has a total of 32TB of memory, architecturally scalable up to 128TB (assuming they don't add on more nodes, right now they're using 65,536 such nodes in the thing)

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: pcslookout
I wouldn't mind having 256 TB of system ram! Half for storage, half for memory! Though what motherboard will fit this much ram and how large of memory sticks will you need to buy ?

You've got to get off the pipe. It's really messing you up.