You can never have too much memory, in the same sense that you can never have too much toilet paper. If this philosophy appeals to you, you might want to check out the latest news from manufacturer MSI. The company announced that it’s enabling support for up to 256GB of DDR5 RAM on at least some of its consumer-grade motherboards, assuming the hardware can handle it and has the standard four memory module slots. If you don’t have a pocket calculator handy, that means a whopping 64GB on each individual DIMM. 2-slot boards will go up to 128GB.

The announcement comes in the form of a short blog post, MSI is partnering with Kingston to show off the latter’s first Fury Renegade 64GB DDR5 modules, enabled by new high-capacity options from industrial supplier Micron. Of course you’ll need to buy the new modules to actually get that much memory into a working desktop PC, but depending on your current setup, you might not need to buy a new motherboard. According to the blog post, both new products and BIOS updates to existing models are planned for the near future.

Kingston

Kingston

Kingston

While 256GB of RAM is certainly an eye-popping number for anyone who’s been around a while (the eMachines tower my parents got for me in high school had 64 megabytes of memory), it’s a relatively incremental bump up from the previous 192GB maximum (48GB per DIMM). And, of course, industrial servers and other specialized machines have been able to go even higher for some time.

What are you going to do with 256GB of RAM on a standard Windows machine, presumably bristling with other maxed-out components? I couldn’t begin to guess.

Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer

Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.

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