Tech
The reason why a PC with 1000 GB of RAM is unable to run video games
With enormous power, one would think this massive investment of a PC would be able to run games. So why is it that they’re not able to?
Gaming on PC has been a hotly debated topic for well over two decades. While many swear by console games, the PC community is constantly searching to build more and more powerful machines to push games to their absolute limits. Always chasing for an extra bit of frame rate or the latest tech like raytracing and frame generation. And with that, things can get a bit pricey.
So when a story like this one about a massively expensive PC that somehow isn’t able to play any games turns up, the community tends to go up in arms about it. The post in question happened in the PC Master Race subreddit, where user Faerco uploaded a picture of their new machine saying that they weren’t given a budget limit for it.
A PC that isn’t meant to play games
According to the user, this machine is quite beefy and has an insanely high cost. It’s got one of the most expensive GPUs available on the market right now, priced at around $6,000, a 56-core CPU, and an entire Terabyte of RAM. Here are the complete specs:
- CPU: Xeon W9-3495X
- Motherboard: SuperMicro X13SWA-TF
- RAM: 1TB Kingston DDR5-4800
- Storage 1: 16TB RAID0 NVME gen4 Boot drive
- Storage 2: 32TB RAID0 NVME Gen4 Storage drive
- GPU: RTX 6000 Ada generation (48 GB GDDR6 VRAM)
- PSU: 1600W
But why did they make this PC if it’s extremely powerful, yet it’s not able to play games? As it turns out, it’s because this is meant entirely as a work computer. The user revealed that the rig “was built for processing massive amounts of LiDAR data,” as they work in 3D point-cloud data processing and modeling, and they needed to tackle the processing side of this operation.
“The fun bit about it utilizing so many cores is that the software (FARO Scene) isn’t optimized yet for this extreme of a processor. Our precision is to within a 1/16th” (<1.5mm), so to be able to do that in any timely manner, you’ve got to have the best of the best. Sapphire Rapids was such a massive improvement over Ice Lake (and my Cascade Lake not pictured) that getting a build like this approved was no problem.”
In simpler terms, the computer is required to process vast amounts of data gathered by LiDAR, and the user’s equipment is so precise that they need to optimize every part of the process. It’s simply not meant to play games, but to be a powerful workhorse that goes way past what common hardware is capable of.