24GB memory on Asus P6T SE for PrPro and AE ?

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Hi guys, long time lurker, my first post here:

I'm about to build a new rig based on:

~ASUS P6T SE (X58 chipset)
~I7 950
~Corsair Venegeance 12GB (3 x 4GB), DDR3, 1600MHz(planning to use 2 kits)
~Nvidia GTX 4../5...

My main concern is that the trend in editing DSLR or HD footage, and generally using Premiere and After Effects on the same time (via dynamic link for color correction, animations, elaborate titlings, etc...), is upgrading the memory to 24 GB.

My instinct is to buy another 12 GB RAM (Corsair Venegeance(3x4GB) too, but i'm afraid that the MOBO will have a hard time recognizing all my 24GB memory.The MOBO's specifications states that supports 24 GB RAM, but i can't find nowhere on the net at least one ASUS from P6T family that run that maximum amount of memory.

Are you using that amount of memory on a X58 ASUS MOBO?

Other MOBO's?

Another memory manufacturer?

Any advice please?

Regards

[Steve Pesenti]

ASUS Motherboard specs can be found at asus.com. The X58 chipset boards with 1366 socket for i7 processors have six slots for RAM taking up to 6 x 4GB.

I run a 24GB set up with an i7 processor on my ASUS board - it works fine.

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Steve, thanks for your input!

I checked the P6T SE specs and indeed they claim that the board supports 24 GB but there's only one pair of DDR3 (3x4 GB) in the qualified vendors page ~ some Kingston HyperX.

The problem is that I already bought 3 sticks Corsair Venegeance (3x4GB) and I want to buy another 3x4GB and I don't know that Asus boards (especially P6T's) are very strict on their qualified vendors.

What memory brand do you have installed on your beast?Did you choose your memory based on qualified vendors sheet?And which Asus mainboard do you use?

Thanks!

[Pete Bauer]

If the specs for the mobo say it can take 24GB, it almost certainly can. But there may be a caveat: voltages.

In my case, I bought 24GB of RAM (6x4GB) rated at 2000 for my P6X58 Premium, but found I couldn't overclock such that the RAM would run much past about 1750 or so. If I tried to clock the RAM higher than that, either the system was unstable or some of the RAM wasn't being "seen" by the system.

I thought at first I might have a bad stick of RAM, but Prime95 ran just fine at spec (2000) if I put only 12 GB at a time in the system. After doing some online reading, apparently it can sometimes be tricky to get all the voltages just right with 24GB of RAM and in some cases there's enough voltage droop with 24GB that you just can't run the RAM at full spec.

I'm not an uber-overclocker and settled for 6x4 GB running at 1600 and slightly faster timings (8-7-8, if I recall correctly) than the original 6x2GB of 1600-8-8-8.

From what little info is out there, RAM speed or timings apparently aren't huge factors for CS5. The AMOUNT of RAM means more. I'll say, though, that although final AME renders tend to be faster and AE certainly likes the additional RAM (so it was definitely worth the upgrade for me since I do use AE), editing performance isn't really that different for me with 24GB than it was with 12GB.

I can't argue the wisdom of sticking with the Qualified Vendors list for hardware, but generally the higher-end Corsair RAM shouldn't give you troubles with an ASUS board. Corsair is usually what I use when I do a build.

Hope my experieince was useful for you.

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Pete,

Your input was great, since nowhere on the internet you can find reliable informations about running 24 GB of RAM on X58 ASUS boards.Everybody asks "Why do you need so much ram, it's a waste of money!"

You guys know your stuff and could advice best about such workstation configurations.I don't really care if i'll have to run the 1600mhz Corsairs at a lower clock, since I'm interested first in stability.Once i'll reach stability with all the 24 GB i'll think about overclocking, now my main concern is that the BIOS and OS(Win7 X64, SP1) to recognize all the RAM.

One question:
I already have three channel modules of Corsair (3x4GB), Is it wise to buy another identical three channel modules, or to RMA them and buy an hexa channel Corsairs (same specs, identical) which are more expensive.

Do the hexa channel kit offers much stability?Again, the hexa and the tri channel are the same rams, they are identical.

Thanks a lot guys, really appreciate your input!

Tri channel:

Vengeance? ? 12GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ12GX3M3A1600C9) - Core i7 Triple Channel Kits - Intel Memory Solutions - Memory

Hexa:

Vengeance? ? 24GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ24GX3M6A1600C9) - Core i7 Triple Channel Kits - Intel Memory Solutions - Memory

[Pete Bauer]

It's generally considered best to get all the RAM together (the 24GB package) to ensure that the sticks are all from the same bin and tested together. However, if there is a quite large price difference between 2 kits of 3 x 4GB kits and 1 kit of 6 x 4GB kit AND if you don't mind the possibility of needing to clock your RAM a little slower in case one kit is "weaker" than the other, then getting the 2 x 12GB will most likely be fine.

In fact, I should have said so in my previous post but that is exactly what I did. The 3 x 4GB kits of 2000 RAM had a very attractive sale price and my local store actually had two kits in stock, so I gave them a try. I suppose it is possible that if I had a matched set of 6 x 4GB, they MIGHT have performed a little faster but I still think motherboard voltage issues were the real limiting factor rather than "mismatched sticks."

If you get 1600-9-9-9 RAM, I don't know what actual speed your system will support but it COULD be a bit less, perhaps 1333 or so.

Either way you go, please do report back because I agree there is too little of this kind of info out there for those of us who fiddle with our own systems!

[Bogdan Nicolau]

I think I'll order another tri channel kit with the risk of sacrificing a little bit the speed of RAM.When i will have all the six sticks up and running, I will report back for sure how they work and if there are significant drops in RAM memory speeds.

And yes, there is too little data about using large amount of RAM, maybe because all overclockers and computer saavy's are interested ONLY in HIGH CPU clocks with low amount of memory in their systems.

Is that true that large amounts of RAM prevent aggresive CPU overclocking?For example if I reach 4 Ghz with my I7 950 with say, 4 GB RAM, and then I add more memory, to keep my CPU at 3.8-4GHZ the chances are zero?

PS: sorry, my english is on night-mode (half asleep)

[Pete Bauer]

It doesn't prevent the CPU from being overclocked (my 980X was 4.14GHz both before and after the RAM upgrade) but the BIOS settings to support all the extra RAM may be different. It just takes more "juice" to run 24GB of RAM than it does to run 12GB so the tweaking strategy may be a bit different.

For me it was a combination of online reading to sort of understand the various BIOS settings and a bit of trial-and-error. I value stability in my editing boxes and won't OC past a stable trial on Prime95 and wasn't willing to put in unlimited time and effort into OC. So when it seemed I was reaching a point of diminishing returns while keeping CPU speed above 4GHz, I stopped.

[Steve Pesenti]

Originally Posted by Bogdan Nicolau

Steve, thanks for your input!

I checked the P6T SE specs and indeed they claim that the board supports 24 GB but there's only one pair of DDR3 (3x4 GB) in the qualified vendors page ~ some Kingston HyperX.

The problem is that I already bought 3 sticks Corsair Venegeance (3x4GB) and I want to buy another 3x4GB and I don't know that Asus boards (especially P6T's) are very strict on their qualified vendors.

What memory brand do you have installed on your beast?Did you choose your memory based on qualified vendors sheet?And which Asus mainboard do you use?

Thanks!

My Asus board is a P6X58D-E. It has 6 x 4GB Samsung sticks. As I said it works fine, but I don't bother to overclock. The system already works fast enough for what I need anyway and it's kinder to the environment :)

So Pete's comments on voltage, etc may be more relevant to you. However, I have in the past mixed memory when adding RAM on previous set ups and never had a problem, although maybe I was just lucky!

Let us know how you get on.

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Guys, thank you very much for your input, today I ordered the sticks but it seems that the Corsair importer have no more 3x 4GB RAMS on stock and i'll have to wait about a week.

When i'll get them i will come back with my first impression.

And Steve, thanks for your specs :)

[Patrick Janka]

I'm not sold on the 24GB thing. When I'm running Adobe products I look at the system resource manager and I never fully utilize the 12GB I already have. My system usually runs at about half of that. Or is there something I'm not doing to tap into all of it? In Adobe I have it set for 9GB to go to Adobe and 3GB for whatever else.

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Patrick,
Do you cross work between Premiere Pro and After Effects when you work on a project?For instance, I prefer to do the rough cuts in Premiere Pro and then import all the clips in After Effects and do titlings, apply masks, color correct, stabilize footage, do up resizes of DV footage (with Boris Continuum Complete)on a HD timeline, or do a little object tracking for example.

When I finish editing and polishing in Pr Pro and AE, I'll leave them open and send the timeline(s) in Encore for blu ray authoring, then I will need another AE timeline for building an animated menu, buttons, transitions between chapters, etc..

What I find amazing is that I don't need to do a single render, all is done via dynamic link.For sure, this kind of workflow will need more than 12 gigs of RAM to work decently.I did it with 12 gigs and I had a lot of lags and it was PAINFULLY slow.Am I doing something wrong?

[Marty Hudzik]

Originally Posted by Patrick Janka

I'm not sold on the 24GB thing. When I'm running Adobe products I look at the system resource manager and I never fully utilize the 12GB I already have. My system usually runs at about half of that. Or is there something I'm not doing to tap into all of it? In Adobe I have it set for 9GB to go to Adobe and 3GB for whatever else.

When I had 8gb ram, and I was running a lot of Adobe apps, it seemed to always hover around 5-6GB usage. Then I moved to 16GB and the same setup and similar projects started using 12-13GB of RAM.

Now I am running 24GB and I see pretty soncistent 18GB usage during heavy editing sessions with multiple programs open.

It seems Windows 7 only lets the programs use the extra memory if you have it. At least that is my experience here.

[Bogdan Nicolau]

Hello everybody!

I received my (looong) awaited Corsair Dominator 24GB kit (Dominator® with DHX Pro Connector and Airflow II Fan ? 24GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMP24GX3M6A1600C9)) one week ago.They worked from the first time, after installing them, entered in bios, setting X.M.P, rebooted and my Win7 x64 recognized all the slots from the first time !!!

Pheeew, I was a little nervous about problems with the mobo and the sticks but it turned that everything worked perfect.

Back to editing, I opened an HDV project (1h 02 min) and dinamic linked all the timeline in AE.I applied some effects (deinterlace, some color grading presets, vignettes) and saved/closed the project in AE.It took a while in Premiere to reconform all the project but after it done its job i played the timeline at 1/2 resolution and there were no dropped frames ! All was real time.

Looking in Task Manager when playing the timeline, my i7 950 (turbo mode on) was full loaded at 3.2 Mhz and all the physical memory was occupied (minus 3 Gb reserved for the system).

I never imagined that Adobe Suite is so hungry for memory, literally, when playing or exporting directly from PPro all the physcal ram was full loaded.

I played with some overclocking and i managed to up the processor speed to 4.2 Mhz with perfect stability and acceptable temps, around 75-78 C in full load in Prime and LinX.

What worries me is that i attained perfect stability with some overvoltage (CPU Vcore: 1.35, QPI/DRAM:1.45 CPU PPL:2.10)

Pete, Harm, what do you think, is that too much?I'm worried about QPI/DRAM and CPU PPL voltage, could i damage something on the long run with these voltages?The temps on full load are under 80 C.

Sorry for rambling, i'm really happy.So, bottom line, 24 GB RAM is a must for cross working between PPro and AE !

Cheers!

[Harm Millaard]

Your OC is a bit higher than mine, 4.2 versus 3.8 (BCLK 191) on my old i7-920 C1 stepping, but I get stable results with CPU @ 1.2875, QPI/DRAM @ 1.325 and CPU PLL @ 1.88 volts respectively, also with 24 GB @ 1.50 V. Notice that ICH is set at 1.2 V

Overclocking is always a balance between stability, longevity and voltages. The lower the voltages, the less strain on the components and thus a longer expected life span, but increased risk of instability. It is a trial and error kind of approach.

Maybe you can lower your QPI/DRAM and/or CPU PLL voltage a bit, while maintaining stability.