Poweredge 840 memory upgrade past 8GB

James,

The 840 still only supports up to 8gb of ram.

Fair comment.

How is that a sham?  Your servers are going on 6 years old and were not even high-end servers when released.

Thats a sham, we have three of these server and are now stuck with limited upgrade options.

Thanks for you quick replies.

This is a pretty old thread.  His comment makes sense either way, although "shame" would have been a more intellectual realization that hardware changes with time.  "Sham" indicates he feels cheated or ripped off at the prospect that there is a hard limit on the amount of RAM that can be installed.  You can interpret his comment as you like; I responded to the comment as it was written ("sham").  Perhaps he meant "shame" - given the accompanying punctuation and grammar, it is likely he did and "sham" was indeed a typo, but sometimes we respond to what is written, not what was intended (if not obvious).

You are right that the amount of RAM (and CPU, and disk speed/capacity, etc.) that makes a machine useful depends on what it is doing ... a single 1GHz machine with 512MB can still be useful - it just depends on what it is doing.

Don't we think he meant "That's a shame."?  Some boxes do adequate work, and their life could be extended with the addition of memory (as OSs always get bigger.)  I still have a 10 year old Dell Poweredge 400 that initially had only 512MB memory; now it has 3.5GB memory and still does the job.

PE machines are powerful and support virtualization (Hyper-V and VMware).  8GB is the base for today's desktop. What would be a good PE machine to have 32GB?

Again, that depends on a lot: What will it be doing? How much processing power do you need? Rack or tower? What OS? Most of the currently shipping servers support more than 32GB RAM.