It's been 10 years, need help deciding on a mobo.

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Trrkk

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Oct 15, 2012
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I'm planning a ramdisk-based system and starting out by picking a suitable motherboard. Main use: gaming. Trying to build it to last. Money isn't a real issue, but hate wasting money on useless 'fluff'. So I came up with 3 criteria:

1: Good quality / manufacturing. I prefer established brands/manufacturers over new ones. Fast ram/CPU support, support for multiple videocards, etc.
2: The more RAM it can support, the better. If it has less than 100 GB, don't bother. 500 would be nice, but I only found that on a mobo that lacked in other areas.
3: Little or none of the aforementioned fluff. Software I don't need, package deals, weird little hardware things I'm never going to use. Wifi, Bluetooth, internal sound card / GPU.. I don't want it.

Any suggestions for good motherboards along those lines?
 
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randomizer


This is something that an SSD will handle easily. Nobody writes games for rack servers, and therefore nobody writes games that require RAM disks.



This is your best option. You are looking for a Frankenstein hybrid of consumer and server hardware that has no market and is not financially viable to manufacture. It does not exist.
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_Vass

_Vass

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owning ssd's? idk
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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A RAMdisk is a completely different concept than an SSD. Many people, myself included, have an SSD as the primary drive. Very easy, and very, very fast.
 
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Trrkk

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Again, read the first post properly. It's all there.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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OK, gaming.

But then you introduce "SSD" into the conversation.
100GB (or 500GB!) of RAM for a RAMdisk will be insanely expensive for a gaming machine. And completely unneeded.

If what you want is an SSD, that is a whole different story.
 
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Trrkk

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I can't keep repeating myself here, money is a lesser part of the equation here. Just.. what kind of mobo would be alright for heavy RAM usage? The bigger ones I found were mainly for servers and such and thus not quite suitable for gaming.

500 is a lot, I don't see games needing that much, not even in the more distant future. But I intend to also run instanced copies of Windows fully in RAM, so you're completely going to end up needing that first 60-100 GB when you're also playing a big game. Over 100 is simply part future-proofing the system a bit. 500 is.. interesting. I might try some weird stuff with that over time.
 
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USAFRet

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Just.. what kind of mobo would be alright for heavy RAM usage? The bigger ones I found were mainly for servers and such and thus not quite suitable for gaming.
Click to expand...

A motherboard that will take 100GB or more RAM IS aimed at the server market, not games.

Add to that the limits Windows has on RAM it can use. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_8

Win 8 tops out at 128GB
Win 8 Pro at 512GB
Windows 7 tops out at 192GB for Pro, Enterprise, and Ultimate.
16GB for Home Premium.
 
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Trrkk

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Markets.. I wasn't looking for anything market-specific. I just hoped there would be a base component that would fulfill my requirements. The RAM limitations to Windows are.. interesting. I'm not sure if that would be a problem if Windows itself ran from RAM (disc space including 'virtual' virtual memory = still just RAM), but it is something that I need to investigate.


Those CPU sockets? I've heard of them, but I haven't thought of the matter beyond 'will I go AMD or Intel'.. yet. I do find it interesting that the Wikipedia page for it mentions that it is used for high-end desktop as well as server platforms. A lot of the mobo's that met my requirements all tended to be for servers, so I've generally dismissed them on those grounds. But maybe there is more to this than I realized.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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In any case - the reason you're only finding boards that can utilize 100+GB of RAM to hold everything in a RAMdisk are server boards, is because there is pretty much no need for them in the consumer space. Not yet, anyway. By the time we need 100GB of RAM, whatever you buy today will be long obsolete.

For instance: I have 16 GB RAM, and a couple of 128GB SSD's, and a few TB of spinning disks. Run multiple VM's routinely. Linux, Server 2012, on a Windows 8 Pro host.
A moderately complex Excel file that lives on the other SSD opens instantly. Like opens before my finger stops moving from the click. Recalculating hundreds of cells in that Excel is equally as fast.

Not sure how much 'faster' holding ALL of that in a RAMdisk could be. I do know that it would be 10x more expensive.
 
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Trrkk

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Well, I'd be doing a bit more with it than opening excell files. There is block loading and threaded loading to be considered, most of the games I'll be playing now and in the future will be using both. With RAM, I really won't have to worry about performance loss in that area for the next 5+ years (future-proofing). There's still other hardware components to consider as well, but if I look at the general trend of games I'd say the final frontier is amounts and speed of RAM, not the CPU or GPU.

Either way, I have a pretty good understanding of the performance gain vs costs and I can actually afford 'a lot more computer' now than I have been able to in the last ten years. It's also good to remember that the money I spend in future-proofing my new rig is money I save in future upgrades/migrations.

All that being said.. any ideas on possible mobos? It really irritates me a bit how many of them come with loads of useless stuff that I'm not asking for. I wish I could just ring up ASUS or whatever and get something custom made...
 
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Trrkk

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Something I forgot to point out:
- Say there is a 500GB ram mobo that's just perfect for me. Will I immediately go and buy 500GB? Nope, I will start out with one strip and just keep buying it slowly and eventually on discount as my needs for RAM increase.
 
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randomizer

randomizer

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This is something that an SSD will handle easily. Nobody writes games for rack servers, and therefore nobody writes games that require RAM disks.



This is your best option. You are looking for a Frankenstein hybrid of consumer and server hardware that has no market and is not financially viable to manufacture. It does not exist.
 
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