Hello, I’m currently thinking back and forth about which new home server to build. What I’ve stumbled across: the i9 and new Core 9 Ultra all only support a maximum of 192GB RAM. However, some of the mainboards support 256GB (with 4 RAM banks and dual channel). Why?

I want to have the option of maxing out the RAM later.

I could buy 4x48GB RAM now and be at 192GB. Maybe I would be annoyed later that 48 GB of RAM is still “missing”. But what if I buy 4x 64GB RAM? 3x64 GB RAM makes no sense, because then dual channel is not used. 4x64 is probably not recognized by the processor?

Or are there LGA1851 or LGA1700 processors, capable of handling 256GB RAM?

  • BCsven@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    I personally believe you are overbuilding. For example my OpenMediaVault Samba Server and DLNA server runs on a SingleBoard that has 256 megabytes of RAM. Yes MB. And it still has RAM free without swap. And I should alter my clock.

    • battlesheep@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      Oh, I’m not using it for OMV and Samba. I’m using it for ollama/open webui with RAM instead of VRAM.

      • andyburke@fedia.io
        0·
        5 days ago

        All current popular AI is meant to run on GPU. Why are you going to spend more money to run it on hardware for which it isn’t intended?

        • TootGuitar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          5 days ago

          This isn’t really true — a lot of the newer MoE models run just fine on a CPU coupled with gobs of RAM. Yes, they won’t be quite as fast as a GPU, but getting 128GB+ of VRAM is out of reach of most people.

          You can even run Deepseek R1 671b (Q8) on a Xeon or Epyc with 768GB+ of RAM, at 4-8 tokens/sec depending on configuration. A system supporting this would be at least an order of magnitude cheaper than a GPU setup to run the same thing.