A Ramble About Computers...

[Bjørn Rørslett]

It is nice that your Thinkpads have room for 4 sticks of memory.  That is a high end feature.

That applies to the W-series Thinkpads, which I use as moveable graphical workstations through a docking station to allow additional displays. The smaller X-series (used for travels) "only" handle 16 GB.

Lenovo only specifies the Wxxx Thinkpads to use 16 GB, though. However that specification must date from an earlier time in history where suitable 8 GB sticks didn't exist. The additional 16 GB come in handy for big stitching projects or for running PhotoNinja as the latter easily devours 10-15 GB on its own.

[Ron Scubadiver]

That applies to the W-series Thinkpads, which I use as moveable graphical workstations through a docking station to allow additional displays. The smaller X-series (used for travels) "only" handle 16 GB.

Lenovo only specifies the Wxxx Thinkpads to use 16 GB, though. However that specification must date from an earlier time in history where suitable 8 GB sticks didn't exist. The additional 16 GB come in handy for big stitching projects or for running PhotoNinja as the latter easily devours 10-15 GB on its own.

There is no one size fits all solution.  It is likely this was my last investment in traditional desktop computing.  Notebook performance has improved a lot because reductions in power consumption allow more powerful chips in these small enclosures.  Meanwhile, desktop performance moves ahead very slowly.  Workstations benefit from more cores, but only on certain applications.

[Frank Fremerey]

The new Skylake chips with 8 or more cores and HT will be hot stuff.  Meanwhile I took back the 32 gigs and am back to the ddr 3000 16 gig chips.  Some tests showed me the extra memory did not do that much on the size panos I do, and the 32 gig  sticks had some serious compatibility issues that limited their performance.

maybe the cheapo motherboard was not the wisest decision?

I have 2x4 memory channels meaning 8x8GB = 64GB.

The memory was cheap. Kingston sealed all channel tested packages. ECC. Set me back 325€ all 8 of them.

[Frank Fremerey]

I stitched 500 6MP files back in the old days with the D70.

Computer was slow. Next to no memory. Autostitch. Ran more tgan 24 hours. Possible. But who wants that now?

[Ron Scubadiver]

maybe the cheapo motherboard was not the wisest decision?

I have 2x4 memory channels meaning 8x8GB = 64GB.

The memory was cheap. Kingston sealed all channel tested packages. ECC. Set me back 325€ all 8 of them.

All Z170 motherboards have the same chipset and follow reference designs.  The more expensive boards have more features and better power supplies to support higher overclocks.  I found a long thread where users of expensive Asus motherboards were getting worse results with the 16 gigs of DDR-3000 I have.  It will run at full speed on my machine, but the .3% improvement in performance over 2800 speed (with the same timings) is not worth the extra heat.  The problem with the 32 gig set has been experienced on many Z170 systems while it works on nearly all X99 systems.  A few Z170 systems recently received bios updates to fix the problem.  My experience, and that of many others, is overclocked systems are more stable and run at lower voltages with 2 sticks of memory rather than 4.  Having few features makes for a less confusing bios. This machine went together with about a third of the effort of the last one, and would have been a real breeze had I not become indecisive about the first 16 gig memory kit, brought it back for 32 and then returned to the same spec 16 gig kit.  Performance is better than I expected with Ps. 

[Frank Fremerey]

I would not have bought the ASUS if Andy had not told me he tested it  and it was a good one.

I usually use the Gigabyte Ultra durable series. They trun really cool and are really very well made.

I never overclock. I buy overclocking hardware though for bigger headroom & increased stability