Mixing memory capacities on a dual Xeon E5 system

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OBasel

Active Member
Dec 28, 2010
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This is probably a really dumb question but here it goes:

What I have:
2P Xeon E5-2620 V1 with 1 CPU. The CPU has 4x 16GB RDIMMs. 64GB is enough for the FreeNAS ZFS server but I want to add a new dual 10gbase-T NIC and a dual SFP+ NIC. Since I use plain HBAs and no expanders (only 24TB total) I have plenty of RAM and CPU, but not enough PCIe lanes.

My question:
Can I add another E5-2620 V1 to the system and 4x 2GB RDIMMs to it just to get the extra PCIe lanes? I'm worried having one processor with 64GB and one with 8GB will screw things up. It'll save me at least $200 and make this upgrade cost effective. From what I read, you basically need to keep similar DIMMs in each RAM channel and processor. That's why I'm thinking it maybe is possible to keep the same RDIMMs on each processor albeit different sets of RDIMMs.

Any gotchas or is this going to work?