The limits of memory

[Devirka]

So imagine that some one has as much money as he can spend, and he wants to buy the compuer with most ram he can get, but not with a custom made motherboard or anything...

What is the highest ram capacity computer he would be able to buy?

Note i do not set any restrictions on OS or manufacturer, just before anyone brings any memory management limitation of desktop operative systems.

[Zutan]

most mobo's you can buy have from 2 gigs to 3 gigs of ram capacity.
(3 is generaly a very expencive mobo, made to be a server)

[Devirka]

I once saw a 4 slot motherboard but this was a while ago. Also I mainly do am thinking about servers since I know their motherboard architecture is quiet diferent.

I would not like to limit the query to Window Servers and the such, this is just to fullfill curiosity really but I is one darn itchy curiosity.

[MrDigital]

4 Slot motherboards are no big deal, most still will only hold 2 to 4GB RAM.

Supermicro offers a Server based motherboard, will handle 32GB RAM.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/E7520/X6DH8-XB.cfm

They also offer P4 Motherboards that hold 4GB.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/P4/?chp=E7221

Both Red Hat Linux and Windows Server 2003 64bit edition support 64GB Ram, but I can't find any motherboards that support that much.

64GB is the limit at the moment for x86 based solutions.

I'm not sure there IS a real limit to memory in a computer based system.

SUN offers many solutions that have more than 1TB RAM and many CPUs :)
http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/sunfire_e25k/index.xml

[Devirka]

Hmmm, if the 64bit eddition does that i presume OSX does too, since it runs at 64bits...

Of course apple does not releases such hardware, as far as I know. Thanks for the info, that is along the lines i was looking for.

[MrDigital]

The Power Mac G5 supports a max of 8GB RAM as does the XServe G5.

[Catila Amano]

AMD64 processors and Pentium 4s with "Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T)" (and presumably all 64-bit processors) can theoretically address 256 TERABYTES of memory space directly (without paging). It will be a while before there is a motherboard that reaches that limit -- after all, we still haven't seen 1-terabyte hard drives, yet (although it's getting REALLY close).

[Wolf]

I was on the Voodoo site, 8gig memory upgrade there, he probably doesn't want to spend 4,000 on RAM though.

[Holy Hippie]

I currently have one of these: http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W2100z/W2100z.html under my desk. It can take up to 16GB of memory. I've only got 4GB in it right now.

[Galnor]

In typical workstation, 4GB - motherboard typically < $300

In high-end workstation/low-end servers, 32Gb seems to be the upper side of things right now.
motherboard ranges from $300 - $2000

In High-End servers not sure , but in the hundered GB to multi TB range, but these are specialized systems.
Systems range in the $50,000 - several million range, with the higher ends needing a dedicated 3phase power supply.

So, it really matters as to what you are looking for :)