 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 128 gigabytes of memory. And naturally, to hit two terabytes as advertised in the video title, we are going to need a lot of them. SK Hynex is also promoting their new Gold S31 SSD. Every component of the Gold S31 SATA 3 SSD was produced, built, and designed by SK Hynex 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 Hynex 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-rank modules into a single slot, and a quad-rank 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 2933 MHz, so that is the rated speed of our AMD EPYX 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 DIMM to load the memory controller like a dual-rank DIMM or an eight-rank DIMM to operate like a quad. Now it comes with a performance penalty, but if you... You didn't find any matching places. I'm not talking to you Siri! 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 Hynex 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 gonna 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. 2,097,152 megabytes of memory running at 2933 million transfers per second. 64 cores of processor goodness. 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 0% memory usage. I could probably even open up Chrome and it would still be 0%. 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 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. It's 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. Oh, no, this is a terrible LinkedIn profile. All right, it seems like he's sticking around. Newgrounds. Oh, I love it. And we'll head over to the MKBHD store. This is my favorite 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 want to find out if cycling through them actually increases it. So we're going to control tab over through all these tabs and see if it jumps. It's going to slow us down quite a bit in terms of how many tabs we can open per minute here. 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, 1000 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 going to run out of 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. 5000 tabs. Here we go, boys. 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, this is 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, Brandon. But I want to get the thumbnail. If I have to open them all again to get the damn thumbnail, it's going to suck. 6000. 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 SATA 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.