PC Building

[hocohen]

I'm planning to buy a PC for working with big Databases.
The CPU will be AMD Ryzen PRO 5965WX or 5975WX
The mother board will be with 8 RAM slots - GIGABYTE MC62-G40 or SuperMicro MB M12SWA-TF.
I will need 256GB RAM.
Not taking price and future expansion into account, which is more effective RAM kit:

8*32 or 4*64?

[petosiris]

Hi @hocohen,

Personally, I'd choose 8x 32GB because they're more available and therefore you have a better selection.  Probably better timings too.  Another thing to consider is ECC.  Be sure to check your motherboard's QVL list before buying, but I think you'll be happy with for instance this kit: Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 CL18-22-22-42 1.35V 256GB (8x32GB) 

[hocohen]

I read somewhere that more slots increase speed but higher the latency...

[petosiris]

Latency depends first and foremost on the CAS (CL) value in the timings, combined with the speed.  The RAM I linked to has CAS value 18 and the speed is 3600 MHz.  If we use a DDR latency calculator we get a latency of 10ns.  This is a good value, especially for such a large RAM kit.  IMO you should avoid RAM with too high latency, if possible.  Some motherboards can have problems with serving all RAM banks and latency may be affected by that, which is why it's important to check the QVL.

[johnnyenglish]

Lucky you 😀 A Threadripper 😀

I'm not skilled at TR CPU's so I might be completely mistaken, but for us Poor People 😁 Common sense says:

You would want less memory sticks, so you don't overburden the CPU IMC. This way you may achieve higher speeds and stability.

As @petosiris said, check QVL.

in the meantime..

I took a peek at GIGABYTE MC62-G40 QVL and depending on what you do, and what kind of budget you have, get registered ECC modules for increased stability around the clock.

Don't focus on MHZ if you are building a workstation/server grade computer, focus on stability.
Downtime is bad for business and bad for Local IT's. 🤣

Good Luck