When can we expect to see 4GB DDR3 DIMMs?

[faxon]

im planning on building a nehalem rig with as much ram as i can cram in it to use as a ramdisk, and having 24GB would help my system performance significantly. im specifically looking to use it as an area of disk space which i can use to rip DVDs and CDs to (CDs in FLAC), and then transcode them to whichever format i will be using as the final format, before moving them off of the disk elsewhere. the system is probably going to have some insane number of drives in it (8+), but disk bottlenecking will still be an issue since i will probably be ripping up to 4 DVDs or CDs at once, and i want a place to throw some of the data to transcode before i bottleneck the transfer rate going to a disk drive.

as an idea of what im up against, i currently have an athlon 4000+ single core. when ripping a CD to FLAC on it, i saturate my CPU just ripping it, forget trying to encode it once the file is ripped (FLAC rips the file, then encodes it to FLAC format). i cant rip more than 1 CD at a time because of this and i cant do anything else while im ripping, making the task extremely tedious. i currently have 400 CDs to rip (at several minutes a disk) and i havent even started on my 300DVD collection (half seasons of TV shows, of which many DVDs are dual layer. the cost of paying someone to rip it and transcode it all for me would be somewhere in the $15k+ range, so i figure since i need a new system anyway i will more than get my monies worth out of a media rig like this. i might also look into a SSD or 2 depending on how much they cost at the time i build, though i would still run into a data bottleneck even with a high transfer speed SLC drive, not to mention the limited capacity.

 

[Denithor]

Why not get something like the Acard 9010/9010B and populate it with 4GB DDR2 sticks? DDR2 is much cheaper than DDR3 and you have the added advantage that this solution doesn't reduce your usable system memory.

EDIT: And just a quick note, I recently copied 32 CDs for a friend at work and it took 3.5 hours. The problem with ripping CD/DVDs is the time required for the DVD drive to perform the rip itself and your super-fast hdd or ramdisk or whatever isn't going to improve that whatsoever (entirely dependent on your optical drive's ripping speed).

 

[21stHermit]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Why not get something like the Acard 9010/9010B and populate it with 4GB DDR2 sticks?

That's trick, but SATA interface? Does someone make a PCI memory card like this? Tried to find one at Newegg, no luck.

 

[Denithor]

If you get the Pro model & run in Raid0 mode (two SATA cables into the same device) you can pretty much saturate the SATA bandwidth in sustained reads/writes (slightly slower writes but still about 3x faster than the fastest SSDs available).

 

[faxon]

yea im aware of the Acard device. i was considering it as another option. this rig isnt going to be built until after the hydra 100 boards are out at the very least, so i will probably reconsider once the time comes around. as for usable system memory, this system will probably be relegated to running distributed computing based applications whenever im not gaming on it, and setting aside some swap file space in ram could be of some use. building a system like this would be as much of a hobby project as it would be to actually reap the benefits of the performance i would gain. if you didnt notice, i dont just plan to rip the files and leave them, i plan to transcode them to a different format once ripped. THIS would be where the performance of a high capacity ramdisk would benefit most, not the initial ripping process. since everything would eventually end up on a storage array anyway, and i would have a lot of drives cranking through disks, i could feasibly see a benefit in using a ramdisk as one of many disks being used to do the encoding work. i havent finalized anything yet though, so its all moot at this point. im mainly just curious when 4GB DIMMs will be out, since i like to have these things planned months in advance so if anything new comes out i can decide if i change anything more quickly than trying to catch up with everything right as im about to build. i could have avoided getting stuck with an unupgradable rig if i had kept up with tech better last time i decided to build, not going to get stuck there again

 

[Zap]

Wow, I didn't know the Acard device existed. Too bad it is so expensive and not available. With 2GB DDR2 sticks at around $10 ($20AR for kit), populating it for a 16GB drive wouldn't be too expensive, just the initial $400... :Q

 

[Chriz]

I'm kind of curious to see if they will make 3GB DDR DIMMS with the introduction of the triple channel memory system, but I haven't seen 4GB DIMMS at all.

 

[faxon]

i highly doubt they would do 3gb. 3gb isnt a multiple of 2 (4096, aka 4GB, is 2^12). all DIMM sticks i have seen thus far are some multiple of 2, based in part on how the ram is addressed and the fact that it would be quite odd to wire a 3gb dimm (.....128mb, 256mb, 512mb, 1gb, 2gb, 4gb), since it would require using 2 different types of RAM chips to manufacture (8x256mb chips and 8x128mb chips).

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: Chriz
I'm kind of curious to see if they will make 3GB DDR DIMMS with the introduction of the triple channel memory system, but I haven't seen 4GB DIMMS at all.

Why? You need a 9GB triple channel kit?

There will be triple channel kits in 3GB and 6GB sizes, an 12GB sizes as soon as 4GB DDR3 sticks become common.