I just bought 128GiB of unbuffered ecc ddr3 last week. 4GiB sticks which would be fine in a dual-socket board with 16 ram slots; (pretty typical, at least on

I just bought 128GiB of unbuffered ecc ddr3 last week. 4GiB sticks which would be fine in a dual-socket board with 16 ram slots; (pretty typical, at least on the amd side of things. I see a lot of dual qpi xeons with only 6 ram slots between them, though.) I paid $1800 or so for the lot. That would give me two dual-socket 64GiB ram boxes. Hell, even if you need 8GiB registered ecc ddr3 modules, that's only around $130 per module[1], or $1040 for 64GiB. (both the qpi xeons by intel and the new G34 and C32 opterons support both reg. ecc and unbuffered ecc, but you generally can't get unbuffered ecc in densities higher than 4GiB per stick) My standard server has 8 cores (2.0Ghz opterons) 32GiB ram, and 4 500gb "enterprise" sata disks. total cost? under $1800. AMD is interesting in this regard because I can get a dual-socket or even quad-socket board (the above system is single socket) and not pay any extra... I just get more cpu sockets and more ram sockets. (on G34 boards you usually get 8 ram slots per CPU socket.) Now, the price of ram varies a lot. I think we're at a low point, but there was a period a year or two back where prices on reg. ecc ddr2 were almost as low as ddr3 is now, and there was a period between then and now where I was paying well over 2x what I'm paying now. But in general, the stuff is pretty cheap. Seriously, we (the VPS providers) are making money on renting you hardware. I am making money, and I'm the opposite of "at scale" (to be clear, I'm paying for my hardware, and paying myself a rather below-market wage. I'm not making a /lot/ of money, but I'm profitable, and by enough of a margin that my rent gets paid on time every month.) As a rule of thumb, I generally make my money back on a new bit of hardware within four months. [1]http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-kvr1066d3q8r7s-8g~7KINM1MT.htm http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-kvr1066d3q8r7s... (I used the same vendor for my unbuffered ecc, but I'm too lazy to look up the part number right now. )