Going Ham With Ram: Adata And Msi Max Out Dimm Capacities Thanks To...
Like we'll be able to afford any of it, the way things are going right now.
Tech headlines out about memory at the moment are all grim reading, thanks to the enormous rise in how much it now all costs. That doesn't mean there isn't something to catch your eye, though, and an announcement from Adata and MSI, as well as a rumour about SK hynix, is great news for anyone who wants to go absolutely ham with RAM.
Starting with the joint venture between Adata and MSI, a new DDR5 module is set to appear on the market that is certainly going to be snapped up by anyone who needs as much RAM as possible in their PCs, without sacrificing performance.
AMD and Intel's latest top-end desktop platforms (i.e. X870E and Z890) support up to 256 GB of RAM. However, to reach this amount, you normally have to buy four 64 GB DIMMs, filling every slot on the motherboard. When you do that, you're typically forced to use the memory's lowest speed (e.g. 4800 MT/s), which isn't ideal for something like high-resolution video editing.
The answer to this is Adata and MSI's 4-rank DDR5 modules. Where most DIMMs have just one or two ranks of memory, these sticks will be so loaded with DRAM modules that each one will offer up to 128 GB of capacity. Not only that, they'll be rated to run at up to 5800 MT/s, though MSI says it has successfully tested these new 4-rank CUDIMMs at speeds up to 10,000 MT/s.
This has all been made possible by the use of a tiny clock driver chip (i.e. these are CUDIMMs), a component that acts as a signal repeater to either allow for very high clock speeds or very large DRAM capacities.
When CUDIMMs first appeared on the market, they were all about maxing out speeds and bandwidth, such as Corsair's Vengeance DDR5-8400 CUDIMMs, but clock drivers are increasingly being used to support the use of more DRAM chips on the circuit board, as Crucial has done with its 64 GB DDR5-6400 CUDIMMs.
There's no word on pricing yet, but given how expensive ordinary DDR5 is at the moment, this stuff is going to be painfully pricey. It's also worth noting that you're pretty much limited to an Intel Z890 motherboard to use it. Some B860s might cope with it, but no AMD motherboard will, as they don't support clock drivers.
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Although these hulking CUDIMMs are really for high-end workstations, what SK hynix is purported to be making is for the other end of the computing scale. It's
Source: PC Gamer
