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I'm planning the build to (finally) upgrade my Phenom II 1090T system and have chosen a 1950x Threadripper CPU and an ASRock Taichi X399 motherboard (the dual Intel gigabit NICs in the Taichi were the deciding factor. Price also).

Aside from RAM, all other parts will be what's currently in my existing system. The old motherboard & CPU & RAM will be recycled into the other machines on my home network.

I'm having a very hard time choosing which RAM to get. I want at least 64GB, and will most likely get 128GB. The current 1090T system has 32GB.

RAM is ridiculously expensive at the moment (and unlikely to get much cheaper in the next 12-18 months), so I want to get the best possible value for money - this system is expected to last me for at least the next 5 years (and hopefully longer).

I'm more concerned with avoiding a bad choice (or wasting money on something that might be X% better in theory but gives me no noticeable benefit in practice), than in making the absolutely best possible choice.

So, my questions are:

  • Is it worth spending significantly more for RAM faster than DDR4-2133 or 2400?
  • Does having 4 or all 8 DIMM sockets filled limit or affect the maximum RAM speed?
  • Is there a noticeable performance benefit from lower latency RAM?
  • HyperX, G.Skill and Corsair are the brands easily available near me in Australia - are there any solid reasons to choose or avoid any of these brands?

I don't really care much about a $50 or so difference per 64GB, but the difference between ~ $1100 AUD for DDR-4 2400 and ~ $1400 AUD for DDR4-3200 is large enough to want to avoid wasting money if it gives me no real benefit. I could use that money to upgrade my video card or buy a pair of PCI-e M.2 drives or something that would give a noticeable improvement.

BTW, $1 AUD = approx $0.75 USD at the moment. We also pay a semi-random "Australia Tax" for imported hardware, which is whatever the importer thinks they can get away with.

Note: this system will run only Debian GNU/Linux. It will never run any version of Microsoft Windows, so Windows-specific issues are not relevant to me in any way.

The system performs 3 main functions:

  1. my desktop/workstation PC running lots of terminal shells, multiple browsers including Chromium & Firefox, and occasionally other GUI apps like Libre Office, and sometimes for playing games. Mostly I use the command line.

  2. my main home server running pretty much everything a home network could need, including dhcp & dns & tftp, a large ZFS pool exported via NFS & iscsi, backups, mail, web, squid proxy, gitlab, KVM virtual machines and docker containers.

  3. a home "lab" machine for experimenting with interesting technology, mostly in VMs.

I know I should split this into two machines (server and workstation) but I can't afford to upgrade it AND buy a new desktop box at the same time...maybe I'll do that next year. I need a Threadripper for this upgrade because a Ryzen 7 doesn't have enough PCI-e slots/lanes. Also, 16 cores / 32 threads.

One final question: does anyone have any links to sites with solid information (not just rumour and speculation) about the Zen+ 2nd generation Threadrippers supposedly due in the 2nd half of this year? If there are likely to be significant bug-fixes in BIOS or CPU it might be worth waiting a bit longer before upgrading, but not if it's only going to be a barely noticeable (<= 5%) performance improvement.

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  • Max budget for the RAM? I get that it's very expensive but it's easier to narrow down your options if you set a price limit. Also, pcpartpicker.com will give a fairly good list of ram kits. Side note, unless you have a reason to pick a particular brand, they are mostly very similar, especially in the top end brands like the ones mentioned.
    – Edward Nunn
    Commented Mar 9, 2018 at 17:24
  • I'm willing to pay more if it results in a significant performance boost. That's the point of my question - is there any human-noticeable benefit from paying more or is it just a waste of money? There's a $600+ difference when buying 128GB - if it makes little or no difference in practice, I'd rather keep that or spend it on something useful. Back in the old DDR3 days, the difference between e.g. 1333 and 1600 was small enough that it was easy to ignore. Now there's 1 Ghz or more of difference. BTW, the main reason for 128GB is for more ZFS ARC - disk caching more than number crunching.
    – cas
    Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 1:20
  • @EdwardNunn I suspect that there is no noticeable difference and not wasting money is a priority for me - but I don't want to spend $2K on RAM and then find that I've cripppled my machine's performance for the sake of NOT spending the extra ~$600. I'll be living with the consequences of my choice for at least the next 5 years.
    – cas
    Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 1:23
  • I would say that if you are running memory intensive tasks, obviously more is better. But I have never needed above 32 gig personally, even though my job is content creation and I use the creative cloud suite extensively. At the moment, my priority on a new machine would be the processor and gfx card, as I run multiple high res monitors on the machine too. I'm inclined to suggest to get 64 gigs for now, and get the other 64 when it's cheaper in a few years time, as you mentioned this is a 5+ year build.
    – Edward Nunn
    Commented Mar 10, 2018 at 13:30
  • Unless your workload specifically depends on high throughput or low latency RAM, there is no significant benefit from fast RAM. Brands rarely matter as they use chips from Samsung, Micron or Hynix anyway.
    – timuzhti
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 6:10

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