javajunkie wrote:

Hi,

Funny, I was advised to buy a ASUS P5B-VM since I need 8MB memory.


I have that board.  Do NOT get it for >3gb of memory.

To get >3gb of mem you need to enable "extended memory remapping" in the
bios

When you do that, the system will be very very unusably slow.

This is valuable information. There goes the trust I had in the shop as well :-( I read some articles also in this list about Core 2 duo, so I want to go for that. I don't care that much about having the cheapest machine available. I just want a machine capable of addressing 8GB of memory.

I notice that server boards seem to have multiple sockets and use quad core processors. They are capable of handling 16GB easily. I don't need so many horsepower in parallel. Nice for a mail or web server running hundreds of threads. I plan to run 1 or 2 heavy jobs in parallel. And I want the job to be able to acquire >4GB memory if needed. So speed is important, but it's number two on the list. First the memory size needs to be OK.

My next stop will be Dell.
Anyone has a good advice?

Thanks,
Theo