Will i7-5930K support 128GB RAM?

[TKerS1]

Hello everyone,

I will be building a workstation computer for scientific computations in the near future. I will need a lot of fast (DDR4) RAM for that purpose. The new X99 platform and i7-5930K processor seems to meet my demands very well. There is only one confusing issue.

The specifications (http://ark.intel.com/products/82931 ARK | Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Processor (15M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz)) states that max memory size is 64GB. Most X99 motherboard manufacturers claim that their boards will support 128GB of RAM. I know there are no 16GB DDR4 modules available at the moment, but many sources claim that those will be available in the future. I am planning on using 64GB RAM in the beginning and upgrading to 128GB as the 16GB modules become available.

So my question is, will i7-5930K fully support 128GB RAM in the future? Is there some inherent restrictions in the processor architecture that it can't fully utilize more than 64GB RAM?

I understand that Xeon processors support (over) 128GB RAM and some Xeons also will support X99 platform, but the i7 variants are overclockable (and Xeons are not). For my purposes, single threaded performance (higher Mhz) is more important than multi-threaded performance. Therefore i7-5930K seems to be the best choice, if it supports 128GB RAM.

Thank you.

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Thanks for joining the processor community.

I understand you would like to know if the processor model i7-5930K will support 128GB of RAM.

At this stage, I do not have any confirmation from engineering that the processor will support more than 64GB RAM.

Please refer to the product specifications for more information:

http://ark.intel.com/products/82931/Intel-Core-i7-5930K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz?q=i7-5930K ARK | Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Processor (15M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz)

Allan.

[IReic]

Hi,

can you please double check this, certain motherboards manufactures (like EVGA) claim to support up to 128GB of RAM using the haswell-e i7 CPU without Xeon.

thanks!

[Allan_J_Intel1]

I am afraid; I cannot confirm this matter because EVGA have programmed their BIOS to support different computer components. I know the processor would support 64 GB of physical RAM because that is stated on the processor technical documentation http://ark.intel.com/products/82931/Intel-Core-i7-5930K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz?q=i7-5930K ARK | Intel® Core™ i7-5930K Processor (15M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz).

Allan.

[idata]

Can someone at Intel please run this to ground? I think the documentation on this processor, as described above, is not correct. See link below showing success with running 128 GB on an i7-5920. I suspect that when the documents were written, the real constraint was the size of the DIMMs (8 GB) available at the time. So quad channel with 8 sockets of 8 GB per yields a total of 64 GB. However, now 16 GB DIMMs are available. With 8 sockets of these, you get to 128 GB.

The old documents might be suffering from the Jurassic Park syndrome, where the computer program only counted up to the maximum number of dinosaurs that the programmers expected. Only there were many more, because they were breeding. You won't find things that you aren't looking for.

Thanks,

Erik

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2938855/hardcore-hardware-we-stuffed-this-pc-with-128gb-of-cutting-edge-ddr4-ram.html Hardcore Hardware: We stuffed this PC with 128GB of cutting-edge DDR4 RAM | PCWorld

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Thank you for you input on this matter. I have based my comments based on the information I get from ark.intel.com.

You could try to send more feedback about memory support at: http://ark.intel.com/Info/Feedback/?source=http://ark.intel.com/products/82931/Intel-Core-i7-5930K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz%3Fq%3Di7-5930K ARK | Feedback

Allan.

[idata]

Thank you. I will head over to ARK and drop them a line.

Erik

[Allan_J_Intel1]

Sure, no problem.

Allan.