Which ITX Intel motherboard for 32 or 64 GB?

Quartz

Quartz

Quartz

Soldato
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My brother's home PC has gone pop and he requires a small replacement. He occasionally brings work home - he does (oil) reservoir modelling and the like - so he needs a formidable PC with emphasis on cores and memory. But it's got to be small. The PC will also be used by my nephew for playing games on occasion. The obvious choice is the Shuttle SZ87R6 with 32 GB RAM, an Intel i7, SSD, and a Geforce 970, but I'm wondering about noise and if there are more appropriate Xeon ITX motherboards? Ones with more cores and greater memory capacity (ECC a bonus).

He doesn't have a budget yet, but he is aware that some Xeon CPUs cost 4 figures.
 
consumer LGA1155 X79 etc.. is limited to a max of 32gb
consumer LGA2011 X99 etc is limited to a max of 64gb

This is a limitation of the consumer cpu's memory controllers, not the actual ram chip sizes. Intels spec sheets state the above limits. - It's a bit frustrating as motherboards often state being able to support higher ( which they can if a xeon is fitted) however then ecc memory must be used (which the boards mostly do not support "or even fit" except in rare circumstances.

If size is really the issue, a new mac pro would be the best bet. They are TINY!, have good support for the latest windows, support upto dual 12 core cpu's and upto 256gb ram.

You can find some minature socket 2011 xeon and ECC supporting boards, however they are very nieche, expensive and mainly directed at embedded solutions, so there are no reviews and hard to come by, support would be a nightmare.

As most workstation users useualy want multiple expansions cards, drive arrays etc, size is not a particular consideration.

You could get a small x99 consumer board fit it with 4x16Mb dd3 chips, however you would have no expansion availability in the future.
 
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