Asus X370 Crosshair VI Hero and 128GBs of RAM

/

It turns out, in the greatest stroke of luck, I was able to install 128GB’s of RAM in my Ryzen Server. The strangest part about this is, Asus says that the Crosshair VI only supports up to 64GB’s of RAM, so what gives? Let’s take a look at how this all went down.

The Claim

This board does support 128GB’s of RAM see below and at 3200MHz. The RAM I bought is the Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 128GB 3200MHz kit.

We can see on the Asus website that shows that this board can only support up to 64GB of RAM. See below.

Another thing that I noticed that was very strange in the Qualified Vendor List (QVL) is that they claimed to test 8 sticks in this board… but the board only has 4 slots for RAM, so what gives there? What makes that more strange is they claim 8 sticks of 16GB modules??? How? That goes directly against their claim of 64GB is the max the motherboard supports. Do they mean to imply instead that the max size of a single RAM stick that is supported can be 64GB in size? While I haven’t tested it, maybe this is what they mean instead. Anyway here is a screen cap of their QVL showing 8 sticks. It should also be said that the Corsair CMW128GX4M4E3200C16 RAM isn’t listed as officially supported.

Oh and here is a picture of the RAM… for fun I guess.

What made me try?

I’ve noticed for awhile now that Unraid claims my Ryzen system can support 128GB’s of RAM and after a recent system crash due to running out of RAM, I was very curious to see if that claim was true. Here is where you can see that we started with 32GB’s and where Unraid shows that the system supports 128GB’s of RAM.

Now here is screenshot of the system after installing the Corsair Pro RAM. Also, I should mention I didn’t have to do anything in the BIOS to make the RAM work and run at 3200MHz. My settings were already set to have the RAM work at 3200MHz from my previous RAM.

You may have noticed that “Docker” is missing from the second screen capture. That is because the Array wasn’t started when I took this screen capture. This was on first boot.

More Details

Okay let’s list out some potentially important details that probably contribute to this whole thing working. This motherboard continues to impress me. I can’t believe it works with the 3700x let alone 128GB’s of RAM. Color me pink!

  • Motherboard BIOS version: CROSSHAIR VI HERO BIOS 7704 12/27/2019

  • Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro: CMW128GX4M4E3200C16

It probably doesn’t matter or has no significant impact but it felt like it should be stated. I am running Unraid version 6.8.3.

Why so much RAM?

I don’t actually need 128GB’s of RAM. I could probably get away with 64GB’s like I intended to do originally. The one reason I went with 32GB’s of RAM in the first place is because during Plex transcoding jobs, I store the movie that is being transcoded in RAM. I do this to minimize the number of reads and writes on my SSDs and the Array. Potentially what could happen and has happened, when there are multiple streams happening, my RAM could fill all the way and the entire system will crash or lock up. Which is part of the reason I even started to seriously consider getting more RAM in the first place.

Watch it instead!

Below is a video of the whole ordeal going down for any who is interested. Just a warning it’s not very detailed.