two terabytes of RAM
how on earth do you pack two terabytes
of RAM onto a single system i mean it sounds crazy to say it out loud
and it is a little crazy i mean unless you're looking at exotic quad or eight
CPU socket designs even a server grade
motherboard like this one from Gigabyte typically tops out in the neighborhood
of 16 memory slots so step one then
is we are going to need some very special memory a single stick of this
RAM has more capacity than your entire
system one of these is 128gb
of memory and naturally to hit two terabytes as advertised in the video
title we are going to need a lot of them
sk hynix is also promoting their new gold s31 SSD every component of the gold
s31 sata3 SSD was produced built and
designed by sk hynix to meet their quality and performance standards we're
going to be using this as our boot drive during our testing and i'm going to have
a link to where you guys can learn more in the video description
i've got to ground myself here i'm pretty sure sk hynix isn't sending me more of these if i zap them so get ready
for a technical deep dive guys traditional registered server dimms
operate in parallel such that effectively each of the individual
memory chips on the module is wired
directly to the memory controller that's built into the CPU so that's where all
the traces that you see running between your memory slots and your CPU socket
come into play now there are two ways that you can
increase the capacity of a memory module you can add more chips by putting them
on both sides or by double stacking them
like we see here or you can actually engineer the chips
themselves with more data areas or
ranks a dual rank memory module might have
exactly the same number of visible chips
soldered onto it but it's effectively like smushing two single ranked modules
into a single slot and a quadrant module
is like stuffing four modules into a single slot
which is pretty cool if you need more capacity but
it causes a small problem the memory controller on a given CPU has
a limited number of ranks that it can be wired into directly before performance
starts to drop off or it reaches a hard
limit so you might run into cases in the server world where even though a
motherboard has you know let's say 16 slots you could populate all of them
with dual rank modules or only half of them with quad rank modules and then
running at a reduced speed there's not much point in doubling your memory
density if you cut away half of your expansion slots and some speed right
like that's classic one step forward two steps back
so we're getting around that problem today using what's called load reduced
or lr dimms and there is a lot of engineering packed into these they run
at a blistering 29 33 megahertz so that is the rated speed of our AMD epic 64
core processor and they have both a ninth chip in each one of these rows
for ecc or error correction and an extra memory buffer chip that
allows the processor's memory controller to operate in serial mode this serial
operation causes a quad rank dim to load the memory controller like a dual rank
dim or an 8 rank dim to operate like a
quad now it comes with a performance penalty
but if you find any matching places i'm not talking to you siri
what what even is this what are you talking about
now it comes with a performance penalty but if your workload requires a ton of
memory taking a small latency hit is a lot better than not having enough RAM at
all
set a good example i love these sockets where you just
screw the cooler right into the socket just need a boot SSD so all the
memory volatile or otherwise in our system is actually made by sk hynix in
korea they're one of only a handful of actual memory manufacturers
in the world and they've been making ssds for years but it's only recently
that they branched out of just system builders and enterprise users into
retail so let's get Windows 10 loaded up on this puppy
moment of truth time server boards lack a lot of the creature comforts of
consumer boards so we're just going to short a couple pins turn it on
like i'm standing here eagerly waiting but i'm not actually expecting it to do
anything anytime soon every time you boot up a motherboard
with a new hardware configuration it needs to go through a process called
memory training and the more RAM you have the longer it takes so this could
take like 10 minutes to turn on the first time
it may have taken long enough for a wardrobe change lttstore.com
but we're up 2 million 97
152 megabytes of memory running at 29 33
million transfers per second 64 cores of processor goodness and i
actually got a cool tip from Gigabyte that apparently if you pop in here and
ignore all of this warning stuff right here you can actually
overclock your memory on this platform so it turns out the maximum limit for
installed memory for Windows 10 pro happens to be
boom you guessed it exactly two terabytes so this is a bog standard
Windows 10 install with
zero percent memory usage
i could probably even open up chrome and it would still be zero
percent before we proceed with our entire test though i do plan to find out
just how many tabs we can handle i want to have a look at what performance looks
like with our configuration it's worth noting that our 64 core processor
actually doesn't have smt enabled so it's only running 64 threads it's a bit
of an idiosyncrasy of this board right now and i haven't spent any time
figuring out boom 52.44 seconds so we're not looking at
some kind of you know crippling performance difference or anything like
that so we got to figure out a good way to do this so brandon hit me with some
websites youtube all right b h photo video i just got
some neopets in there you know linkedin
what are you talking about brandon what are you doing on linkedin
oh she's sure yeah hey there he is
nope this is a terrible linkedin profile all right it seems like he's
seems like he's sticking around new grounds oh i love it and we'll head
over to the mkbhd store this is my favorite uh 10 million subscriber
commemorative merch right here chrome is actually using two and a half gigs of
RAM right now doing functionally nothing
so it's a hog still it just doesn't make a
dent it doesn't even register it's flatlined
so let's do it let's open all 20 tabs in
a new window yes i'm sure all right we jumped from 5 to 5.8
now i wanna find out if cycling through them actually increases it so we're
gonna control tab over through all these tabs and see if it jumps
it's gonna slow us down quite a bit in terms of how many tabs we can open per
minute here if we have to do that and it looks like we don't
hey that's great news so now this just becomes an exercise in
how fast can i click this is super dumb
i want a piece of paper you know i'm going to start tallying how
many tabs i'm opening i need paper update for you guys
at 200 chrome tabs we are now at 10 gigs
of RAM and 1 usage 600 tabs 700 tabs 900
tabs 1 000 tabs
5 this is interesting neopets seems to be
our heaviest website first you take my
youth then you take my CPU cycles we are up to 69 CPU usage well i think we're
gonna run at a CPU before we run out of memory here guys we are over one stick
of memory use now 132 gigs chrome at least admits that
it's using over 100 gigs of RAM now power usage very high 5 000 tabs here we
go boys rent hey we're at 10 RAM usage
now so that's sick
but what's interesting is that in spite of us having resources available to us
the system is getting slower and slower and slower to the point where even when
this ad managed to load in i couldn't help but notice it was running at a
super crazy low resolution look at this
here here's a perfect example it just froze while it was playing back that's
what it looks like opening a hundred now when we already have 5000 open in the
background was like opening up the first
500 when we did it now this is interesting i was going to rearrange the
tabs to shoot the thumbnail and we got a spike in CPU usage and i'm not sure if
memory actually changed but check this out a bunch of these tabs
that were already open before are reloading now so it seems like
interacting with the window actually gets it to refresh but that
doesn't change our RAM usage and since that's what we're after i guess that's
still okay uh-oh oh no
we might have hit our limit brandon
brandon i'm rolling we might have hit our limit brendan
but i want to get the thumbnail
if i have to open them all again to get the damn thumbnail it's gonna suck
six thousand we're at the point now we're doing
almost anything in chrome on the system i'm trying to combine a tab i
accidentally dragged out of a browser window back into it and it just
it's not responsive enough to do it but what oh hey
it did it okay so we got that
i mean gimp's managing to open up so that's cool
we are just shy of 200 gigs of memory
usage now and that's just from rearranging all the
tabs we were at closer to like 185 weren't we this is so weird check this
out this up here says amazon
but mkbhd is also selected and this is
an apple website
so strictly speaking we may not be at
the limit but from a practical standpoint
i think we've reached the limit oh no i think i just did the wavy thing
where everything minimizes
the system is completely unusable at this point
look at them all go a right click three four five six seven 25 20 there it
is just shy of 30 seconds just to right
click so we only managed to use about a tenth of
our RAM half of our CPU
but we seem to have reached architectural limits of the software
itself whether it's chrome or Windows
and 6000 tabs is well beyond what is
actually usable in google chrome i hope
you guys enjoyed coming along with us on the ride massive shout out to sk hynix
for sponsoring this video sending over two terabytes of memory even though we
didn't manage to use it all this time and of course providing their
gold s31 SSD for us to boot off of it's available in 250 gig 500 gig and one
terabyte capacities it comes with a five year warranty and if you're looking for
a high performance say SSD you guys can check it out it is at the link in the
video description so thanks for watching guys hope you had as much fun as we did
with this insanity and we will see you in the next video if
you enjoy more server type content like this we actually built a crazy nas a
little while ago you can check out that video down below