I went all in and I won!

[NeoGen]

I have had for a while plans to upgrade my machine, and have been setting aside a little bit every paycheck for it... well, the time has finally come! :icon_twisted:

My initial setup consisted of a Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P, which is a good sturdy AM3 motherboard, and has served me well for a few years already. On top of it I had a nice Phenom II X3 720 @2.8GHz, and a total of 16Gb of RAM in 4x 4GB DDR3 Corsair XMS3.

I wanted to create a new cruncher and at the same time pull this good old motherboard up to it's limits, so I engineered a plan to get a second mobo for a new machine and get some top notch components to place on my older mobo, and fill the newer one with the older processor and RAM.

I checked Gigabyte's website and they must have been doing CPU tests recently because the Compatibility lists stated the Phenom II X6 1100T as compatible! And I thought to myself... this is going to be it! :icon_mrgreen:
I purchased one online, for a modest $200 (ouch!) but man it is worth every penny!! I installed it with the stock cooler and at stock speed, running boinc at 100% cpu usage, and it hasn't gone above 57 Celsius! I am definitely going to kick it up a few hundred MHz up tomorrow! :icon_mrgreen:

But I wasn't satisfied yet... and the next new machine to be built will need RAM, so I will need to get some. I have been seeing 8Gb DDR3 chips floating around lately, and although they're expensive and rumored to have low chance on compatibility, I could imagine myself riding 32Gb of RAM here and running some very heavy duty prime testing projects.
Checked GigaByte's website again and unfortunately nothing was listed regarding 8Gb RAM chips...:icon_neutral: so I decided to take the plunge but order just 1 pair instead of 2... in case I had to return it. I bought 2x 8Gb GEIL EVO TWO DDR3 1333MHz. Not the fastest RAM around, but I prefer capacity and price over speed.
As I was waiting for them to arrived I kept reading about GEIL and 3 out of 4 people would say they are awful and their memory sucks... I was getting scared! :( But they eventually arrived and after setting them up they worked perfect! Bios detected 16 Gb of RAM right off and Memtest86+ ran a full pass (>2 hours) without finding any errors. So now I got 2 slots free... I may go online again and buy another set to total 32Gb of RAM. :icon_mrgreen:

But right now I am happy as I could be, with a Phenom II X6 at 3.3GHz (stock) and I even installed 2 of the 4Gb chips I had, so it totals 24Gb of RAM.
Now someone point me to the DC projects that drain the most possible RAM (BURP, Renderfarm.fi... others?) and I will do some damage on them. :)


p.s. - The only bad thing is that this AMD stock cooler is "server-like" noisy and I am right next to the machine when I'm at the computer... This AMD stock cooler has got to go!!

[AMDave]

Wait a sec. Before you get the next 16GB of dimms, make absolutely sure that the board will support it. There are some that will support 16GB but not 32GB.
I see here that the GA-MA790X-UD4P board supports up to 16 GB: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3038#sp
"4 x 1.8V DDR2 DIMM sockets supporting up to 16 GB of system memory"
is that total or is it 16GB per slot?
You want to be sure about that before throwing more money at it.

NB - the spec also says DDR2 but you are using DDR3. are you still talking about the GA-MA790X-UD4P board from your initial setup?

100% agreed on the noise factor. There are some excellent after-market coolers that are nice and quiet compared to stock.
I have been very happy with the Cooler Master 5 II cases and their after-market heat-pipe CPU coolers.
Everything was easy to install and has run reliably since.
YMMV but that's my experience for wot it's worth.

[Dirk Broer]

Nice thing about AMD is the interchangability of coolers. Socket A, 754, FM1: they all use the same cooler fastening system.
I bet it is the same for 939, 940 and AM2/3/3+ as well (But alas not for F, C32 and G34, but they may be interchangable amongst themselves).
So if you are in possession of one or more real good cooler(s) for older AMD systems, then there is a very big chance that the cooler(s) may serve another round.

Speaking about RAM plans: My new FM1 Mobo can even be stacked up to 64 Gb of RAM, in 4x16 GB not-yet-deliverable sticks.
But there is a big chance that it will not be able to use 64 Gb of 1866 or 2133 RAM, at least not very soon.
The present manual mostly does not go further than 8 Gb setups and already warns that the black slots -you are supposed to place the first two sticks in the blue ones- may not be usable at very high memory speeds (2133 to 2400Mhz)

GEIL 1333 can be fast, if it is the 7-7-7-24 variant. Only G.Skill (7-7-7-21), OCZ and Corsair (7-7-7-20) offer better, according to the F1A75 manual.
Those 7-7-7-20 puppies are not garuanteed to work in all four slots though. 9-9-9-24 offers you more chances for a future 32 Gb.
In fact GEIL 1333 Mhz 9-9-9-24 is the only 16 Gb setup listed in my F1A75 manual (GET316GB1333C9QC 4x4)

[NeoGen]

NB - the spec also says DDR2 but you are using DDR3. are you still talking about the GA-MA790X-UD4P board from your initial setup?
Oops... I see what you are saying... I had a small typo on the motherboard model... It's GA-MA790XT-UD4P

Sorry guys for the mistake. Yes, this one uses DDR3 only. And I know it goes beyond 16Gb because I filled the 2 empty slots with 2x 4Gb chips and it upped the memory to 24Gb. So... I'm assuming there should be no problem from 24 to 32. :)

When I started windows and was running boinc SAT@Home WU's the free memory count on the task manager was up to 20Gb (out of 24)... when the first BURP workunit landed on boinc that value dropped to about 5 Gb.:shocked: Between BURP memory hogging and Windows file caching almost the whole amount disappeared!

[AMDave]

ok. That makes more sense. Glad your test worked for you. :)
You can run a lot of VMs in that amount of space. I have had up to 21 VMs running in 16GB. It can probably do much more, but I haven't fully automated the VM creation and initialisation step yet.
Maybe you can tell us once you get that monster running.

[NeoGen]

9-9-9-24 offers you more chances for a future 32 Gb.
In fact GEIL 1333 Mhz 9-9-9-24 is the only 16 Gb setup listed in my F1A75 manual (GET316GB1333C9QC 4x4)
9-9-9-24 is exactly the timings that mine is running at, and like I said before I prefer capacity and price over speed, so I'm not even going to try to manually change it on the BIOS. They are running great! :)

Also bumped up the CPU from 3.3GHz to 3.6GHz and ran Prime95 for over half hour. Temps stabilized at about 64 C on full load (vs 57 C at stock 3.3GHz) and not a single error to be found. I'm pretty sure I could bump it even higher still on the stock cooler, but I will let it ride at 3.6GHz for now while I'm looking up a better and more silent cooler.

[Dirk Broer]

When I started windows and was running boinc SAT@Home WU's the free memory count on the task manager was up to 20Gb (out of 24)... when the first BURP workunit landed on boinc that value dropped to about 5 Gb.:shocked: Between BURP memory hogging and Windows file caching almost the whole amount disappeared!

I won't start BURPing till I have the full 64Gb aboard....

[NeoGen]

64Gb is too much I think, because BURP workunits are multithreaded, so it takes only 1 WU to take over all your cores. These BURP WUs are demanding in terms of memory and a PC with 8Gb only won't be able to download them as the BURP server replies that the PC does not have enough RAM. But I think 64Gb would be overboard, it may take up to 20Gb already with windows 7 also memory hogging, but it would not reach 64Gb any time soon.

[plonk420]

the last two times a took a peek @ burp running, i only saw it using 4.5gb. high point i think i saw was 9ish (project was demanding 12gb).

edit: high point, about half a year ago