What limits the amount of memory a system can handle?

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golinux

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Aug 20, 2015
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I have an ASUS M2N4-SLI mobo with the nForce 500 SLI chipset. The mobo's listed max RAM is 8GB, but I would like to have more than that if possible. What's the limiting factor here?

Is there anyone out there who has tried >8GB RAM with this mobo or chipset?
 
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I would avoid going above the listed amount of ram, there is hardware limitations in terms of the amount of ram lanes(is that a term?) and you do not have the bandwidth to run more than that amount in that motherboard. It depends on the amount of the address lines the manufacturer has put on the pcb, most cpus support 64 address lines, aka 64bit operation, whereas older 32bit cpus only could support 4gbs of ram. Every address line added by the manufacturer increases the amount of ram you can support by powers of two, so theoretically asus only put 33 of the 64 address lines on the pcb, so the maximum is 8gb, twice as much as 32 address lines.
More ram would just not be used and would sit there undetected, I am sorry to say.
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Rooster__

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Jan 26, 2016
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I would avoid going above the listed amount of ram, there is hardware limitations in terms of the amount of ram lanes(is that a term?) and you do not have the bandwidth to run more than that amount in that motherboard. It depends on the amount of the address lines the manufacturer has put on the pcb, most cpus support 64 address lines, aka 64bit operation, whereas older 32bit cpus only could support 4gbs of ram. Every address line added by the manufacturer increases the amount of ram you can support by powers of two, so theoretically asus only put 33 of the 64 address lines on the pcb, so the maximum is 8gb, twice as much as 32 address lines.
More ram would just not be used and would sit there undetected, I am sorry to say.
 
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CircuitDaemon

CircuitDaemon

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Feb 23, 2016
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It's a DDR2 board. There are not much manufacturers that made 4GB sticks except for the server market, and for the same reason most desktop chipsets won't support them. I know some gigabyte motherboards had bios mods that enabled them to use more than those 8GB of RAM, but they were specific mods for those models and even then, it was kind of pointless. Even if you could get something working on that motherboard, I don't see any AM2 processor that can be run in that board that would be powerful enough to do anything that would require more than 8GB of RAM.
 
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