steakboy Posted January 2 Posted January 2 I'm finally taking the plunge into a home lab. Specifically I got a license with HexOS, and am basically following along with this video (https://www.floatplane.com/post/Ymg3KnpzG3). Conveniently I was able to snag an old Dell Optiplex 3070 from work to use at home. The box has 1x4gb 1Rx16 2666mhz ram in it. It has 2 slots total, so im going to replace the single stick of 4gb with 2 sticks of 16gb. I know its safe to go with 2x16gb 2666mhz. But can I get faster ram? Looking at some spec sheets (https://objects.icecat.biz/objects/mmo_72514727_1562744963_5139_20047.pdf) it says that 16gb modules ARE supported. Max 32 GB supported. but only mentions 2666mhz as a supported speed. Since its an OEM motherboard, I cant really find anything about the chipset. So the 'safe bet' would be to stick with 2666, since any faster i probably wont see much performance increase anyway. But just in case, im asking yall if I can use faster ram. The Specs: Intel i5 9500 4gb 2666 RAM Dell Optiplex 3070 Cougar MLK MT 17539-3 motherboard QUESTIONS: 1. Is RAM speed completely dependent on CPU? Or does the motherboard matter too (since most advertised speeds are 'overclocked' and overclocking requires appropriate chipsets?) 2. Does this dell optiplex support faster ram? If so, which speed should I get? 3. On Newegg is mentions PC4-21333 and PC4-21300 as a subset of DDR4 2666. What is PC421333/300? are they essentially the same, and i should just buy which ever matches my budget? Quote
dinecoj Posted January 2 Posted January 2 1. I think the biggest factor is the chipset on the motherboard 2. Some googling says the Intel H370 chipset on that motherboard is limited to 2666MHz max. You could get RAM rated for faster than that, but it would only run at 2666 3. PC4-21333 is naming convention: PC4 = DDR4, 21333 = transfer rate in MB/s ( 2666MHz * 8 bytes / tick ~= 21333) Quote
Mobius Posted January 2 Posted January 2 before i built my server i did a decent amount of google searches to see if faster ram makes a difference. Pretty much everyone just said to focus on more ram than faster ram. Quote
PsychoWards Posted January 2 Posted January 2 Concerning question 1: Nowadays, the memory controller is baked into the CPU, so the CPU defines the supported Memory speed and quantity (mainly). In this case it is the 2666 which was mentioned and since everything higher then this is considered overclocking, and a lot of H370 boards don't support overclocking, that's why you are likely limited to this speed. Some Mid- to High End H370 boards support overclocking but I doubt that an OEM board does. Therefore, don't go with faster RAM and take more RAM instead. 1 Quote
dinecoj Posted January 2 Posted January 2 10 hours ago, Mobius said: Pretty much everyone just said to focus on more ram than faster ram. Yep! Since ZFS uses RAM for caching, more RAM means more cached data which means faster retrievals. Compared to the bottlenecks like 1Gb networking, HDD speeds, etc, RAM speed shouldn't be very impactful. Quote
Mobius Posted January 2 Posted January 2 4 hours ago, dinecoj said: Yep! Since ZFS uses RAM for caching, more RAM means more cached data which means faster retrievals. Compared to the bottlenecks like 1Gb networking, HDD speeds, etc, RAM speed shouldn't be very impactful. ah yeah that makes a lot of sense. Quote
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