# 128GB on i9 9900k?



## FriFlo (Apr 19, 2019)

Since the arrival of this processor there were articles about them supporting 32GB modules and therefore up to 128GB of RAM. But to this day, I couldn’t find a DDR4 kit of that capacity. Neither could I find confirmation that any x390 motherboard would support that amount of memory. Does anyone here know more about it?


----------



## wcreed51 (Apr 19, 2019)

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232820


----------



## jamwerks (Apr 19, 2019)

I'm interested in this also. And guessing that W10 and/or bio's would also have to support this in some way?


----------



## Robert_G (Apr 19, 2019)

There are a handful of MBs that have 8 ddr 4 ram slots for 128 total, but 32 for each slot? Not yet it seems....or at least finding a compatible MB would be frustrating


----------



## chimuelo (Apr 19, 2019)

W Series Xeon boards have TBs of RAM.
The CPUs are slightly more expensive.
Quad Core W is 429 bucks, 8 Core around 750 IIRC.

If you have to have a single DAW why not spend a little more for huge RAM counts and fast Optane DDR too.

I personally don’t need that much RAM but damn, a 1 TB machine packed with NVMe Devices sure sounds amazing.


----------



## EgM (Apr 20, 2019)

According to Intel, it does support 128gb. Just gotta find a MB that does.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-9900k.html


----------



## Fredeke (Apr 23, 2019)

Excuse the newbie question, but in which situation would you need so much RAM ? My system has 16Gb and yet hardly uses its swapfile.


----------



## FriFlo (Apr 23, 2019)

Fredeke said:


> Excuse the newbie question, but in which situation would you need so much RAM ? My system has 16Gb and yet hardly uses its swapfile.


Then you probably do not use a lot of orchestral samples and libraries that need a lot of memory. Most professional composers want to load their important (or sometimes pretty much all - that is very different) libraries ready to play in a so called template. A personal case: on my pretty old slave machine with 64gb I cannot load all Berlin Brass (including expansions) and Percussion. I have to disable all of it and load what I need for a project.
While, on the one hand, I will try to automate the disabling process and therefore be able to get much more loaded per PC, it is still unbeatably quick to have the most important stuff always loaded. Doubling the RAM from 64 to 128GB definitely helps with that, especially if you wanna come down with the number of slave machines.


----------



## FriFlo (Apr 23, 2019)

chimuelo said:


> W Series Xeon boards have TBs of RAM.
> The CPUs are slightly more expensive.
> Quad Core W is 429 bucks, 8 Core around 750 IIRC.
> 
> ...


Slightly more expensive? The 8core w processor (2145) is about 2,5 times the price of a 9900k. And that is not even the best choice, as it does not turbo to 5GHz like the i9 does. When going for the Xeon Ws the 2155 with 10 cores is probably the best choice and it is more the 4 times the price of the 9900k. And that is only the processor ... look at the price difference for motherboards and ECC ram and you will quickly see why it is not just slightly more expensive. At least here in Europe, I cannot see why someone would say that.
In my case, I am currently thinking about building a hackintosh and that has just become possible quite easily on the z390 motherboards. I would only consider it, if it was an easy build. For Xeon Ws I cannot find some "golden" example builds, for the x399 platform it is not a piece of cake ...
For renewing my slave machines, the Xeon W processors could actually become an option, if they go down in price a bit ... the only problem so far: for all i9, i7 and AMD Threadripper processors, I can get a decent idea how many voices a machine will handle from Scan Pro Audio daw bench tests. Unfortunately, they haven't tested any Xeons so far ...


----------



## FriFlo (Apr 23, 2019)

wcreed51 said:


> https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232820


That looks quite right! Thank you. It is a bit expensive at the moment, but they did also mention with ASUS z390 mainboards are supported. A bit strange though: according to the ASUS website, they only support 64GB of ram ...
It is probably a bit early to jump for a i9 9900k with 128GB at this point. I guess I wait a little longer...


----------



## Fredeke (Apr 23, 2019)

FriFlo said:


> Then you probably do not use a lot of orchestral samples and libraries that need a lot of memory. Most professional composers want to load their important (or sometimes pretty much all - that is very different) libraries ready to play in a so called template. A personal case: on my pretty old slave machine with 64gb I cannot load all Berlin Brass (including expansions) and Percussion. I have to disable all of it and load what I need for a project.
> While, on the one hand, I will try to automate the disabling process and therefore be able to get much more loaded per PC, it is still unbeatably quick to have the most important stuff always loaded. Doubling the RAM from 64 to 128GB definitely helps with that, especially if you wanna come down with the number of slave machines.



Thanks for the answer. I suspected something like that, but I don't do orchestral compos, so I wasn't sure.

Just for my education, when you say load all your librairies, do you mean the first bit of each sample that's needed before DFD kicks in, or the whole samples' length ? I have no sense of scale, for lack of experience...

Also, doesn't loading 100Gb to RAM take a while - like, opening a project would take 30s to a minute ? I assume your librairies are still on a spinning hard disk - oh wait - if you can afford an i9 and 128Gb of RAM, I suppose you also have a huge SDD - and yet the SDD is not fast enough for DFD ???

(Not arguing, just being curious)


----------



## FriFlo (Apr 23, 2019)

Fredeke said:


> Just for my education, when you say load all your librairies, do you mean the first bit of each sample that's needed before DFD kicks in, or the whole samples' length ? I have no sense of scale, for lack of experience...


Usually just the first bits (DFD). But some libraries offer features like time stretching. For these, it might be required to load some samples fully to RAM. The amount needed per sample (called buffer size) can also be set in most samplers like Kontakt. This way you can influence, how much RAM is needed. On the other hand, you loose a bit of the performance (voices at the same time) when decreasing the buffer. 


> Also, doesn't loading 100Gb to RAM take a while - like, opening a project would take 30s to a minute ? I assume your librairies are still on a spinning hard disk - oh wait - if you can afford an i9 and 128Gb of RAM, I suppose you also have a huge SDD - and yet the SDD is not fast enough for DFD ???


Not 30 minutes, but it can take a while. The way that is usually done is by using VEpro to load your template. This way you have to load the template only once and can switch (Cubase-)projects without waiting time. Some composers even leave the PCs on 24/7, but I wouldn't do that in Germany! The electricity costs are very high and people usually have to rent their rooms and pay quite a lot for just a small space. That is why you cannot put your own solar panels on the roof.
All libraries are on SSDs. HDs do perform a lot worse and - indeed! You might look at loading times of more the 30 minutes if you were loading everything from HDs. The cost has really come down for SSDs and you don't need the fancy m.2s for samples. 2tb drives can be bought for under 200€.


----------



## Jan16 (Apr 23, 2019)

Earlier this year ASUS and Gigabyte were reported to have a bios update for Z390 motherboards which support 128 Gb RAM. 

One other thing to be aware of is that the 32 Gb RAM sticks of G.Skill are 'double height', according to the site of G.Skill 59 mm / 2.32 inch. So when choosing a CPU cooler it would be wise to check beforehand if the RAM sticks do not get in the way of the cooler.

Update: the site of Gigabyte now mentions the support of 128Gb RAM for the AORUS Master (and also other Z390 motherboards).


----------

