Corsair Runs 128GB (16GBx8) Of DDR4-3800 On Intel’s X299 Platform

Considering just how intense the rumors surrounding Intel’s Core X-Series processors were leading up to Computex 2017, it wasn’t much of a surprise to see that the company actually went ahead with unveiling the lineup at the show. What really did surprise me, though, was what Corsair had on display in its Grand Hyatt suite: really high density, high performance memory.

When I first saw the rig above, I figured it was running 64GB of memory (8x8GB), and then I was impressed to see that all of that RAM was running at DDR4-3800. Hitting those kinds of speeds on modest kits (16GB) is not difficult, but the more DIMMs that are populated and the higher the densities, the harder these top-end speeds are to achieve. So color me surprised when I found out that this rig was actually running 128GB of memory at those speeds!

Here’s the proof:

There are a couple of things worth noting here (and no, it’s not the devilish tRFC), with the first being the fact that the timings have not suffered much at all despite the huge densities used here. Typical 16GB or 32GB kits are typically spec’d with a CAS latency of 18 (at these speeds), although some still use CL19, as these eight 16GB modules do. There is no caveat about this kind of configuration from a performance standpoint – just a pricing standpoint (these cannot be cheap).

Another interesting thing is what can’t be seen in the pic: that the DRAM frequency varied on occasion (the lowest I saw was 1650MHz). I am not sure if that was a new feature of the Intel X299 platform or not, but touching the DIMMs, it didn’t seem like heat would have been the issue. It could be that on Intel’s new platform the DIMMs can vary in speed just for the sake of being more power efficient, which would be a welcomed feature. With Intel’s X299 platform set to drop soon, it won’t be long before we find that out ourselves.

Ultimately, though, if you want to run a very fast kit of memory but don’t want to sacrifice performance, it looks like X299 will be able to support that.