Memory upgrade

In 2006, I built up a high-end (at the time) system consisting of two dual-core 2.0 GHz Xeon processors and eventually built it up to 8 GB of DDR2-533 memory. Now I'm bumping up against the 8 GB (~6GB with OS etc.) limit with instruments such as the 1903 Cavaillé-Coll with all of the goodies enabled and want to upgrade. The system currently has all 8 slots occupied with 1 GB DIMMs. The easiest upgrade would be to replace two DIMMs with 4 GB modules which would increase total memory to 14 GB. I'm reaching out to the power users in the forum for your experience and opinion regarding memory requirements for the larger instruments currently available. It seems that 14 GB should be sufficient but in '06 I couldn't imagine needing more than 8 GB. As the machine is a bit of a relic by PC standards, I only want to perform one more upgrade. A more expensive option is to remove all of the DIMMs and install 4 4-GB 667 modules and get a speed increase as well as a bump to 16 GB but I'm not sure this would be money well spent.

- Jim

Jim,

Have you researched the price of 8 x 2GB modules vs 2 x 4GB modules, nevermind 4 x 4gb modules? That could be the way forward and give you the full 16GB at a cheaper price than you 14GB option.

I'm not into server architecture, but isn't the memory split such that 4 slots will be from one Xeon and the other 4 slots for the other Xeon? In which case, do you need to be careful to balance the memory allocation in some way? Equally, having unequal memory in paired slots (hence DDR2) can be a problem. The above suggestion was originally based on price, but it may also be the best way forward for optimum running as well relative to the 2 x 4GB option.

Hope this helps - there are others who know far more than me on the forum, so I defer to them
Andrew

[micdev]

Jim,

Make sure that your motherboard/bios allows more than 8Gb of ram... this can be a limitation. You do have a lot of slots but the chipset and bios might limit your system...

François

Andrew,

You raise a good point - repopulating the 8 slots with 2 GB is a bit cheaper and yields a balanced (and faster) 16 GB configuration for maximum interleaving performance. I hate to throw away 8 perfectly good 1 GB DIMMs but that's the classic dilemma with memory upgrades. I can probably use them to upgrade one of my other machines.

François,

I did check for 16 GB BIOS support and it looks like I'm OK.

Thanks for the suggestions!

- Jim