Supermicro X8SIL-F ram questions

[Warsong]

Hello everyone!

I recently purchased a Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard to make a small for factor NAS and I have few questions about the supported RAM configurations. I was reading through the docs available on the Supermicro website but I don't fully understand all the details with regards to the ranks, speeds and sizes.
I would like to use Registered ECC ram either 16GB or 32GB.

The first thing I noticed was that there's a warning on the page that reads:

Note: Supports 1-Gb and 2-Gb x8 devices only - Intel 3420 / 3400 Chipset Memory Requirements

Does that mean that this board can only use RAM sticks that are configured like [1,2,4]Rx8?

As for the configurations, the manual has the following tables:
1. DDR3 ECC Registered (RDIMM) Memory Support
RDIMM | 1Gb (x8 DRAM) | 2Gb (x8 DRAM)
Single Rank | Up to 4GB (4 x 1GB DIMM Modules) | Up to 8GB (4 x 2GB DIMM Modules)
Dual Rank | Up to 8GB (4 x 2GB DIMM Modules) | Up to 16GB (4 x 4GB DIMM Modules)
Quad Rank | Up to 16GB (4 x 4GB DIMM Modules) | Up to 32GB (4 x 8GB DIMM Modules)

2. DDR3 ECC RDIMM Memory
DIMMs Slots per channel | DIMMs populated per channel | DIMM Type | POR Speeds | Ranks Per DIMM (any combination)
2 | 1 | Registered DDR3 ECC | 1066, 1333 | Single Rank, Dual Rank
2 | 1 | Registered DDR3 ECC | 1066 | Quad Rank
2 | 2 | Registered DDR3 ECC | 1066, 1333 | Single Rank, Dual Rank
2 | 2 | Registered DDR3 ECC | 800* | Quad Rank
*Note: 1066 RDIMMs running at 800MHz-BIOS will be automatically downgraded to
800MHz speed.

(Tables are clearer in the manual page [2-10/2-11] https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/3420/MNL-1130.pdf)

From what I understand from these tables is following:
For 16GB configurations:
- 4x 4GB 2Rx8 RDIMM ECC 1066MHz or 1333MHz
- 4x 4GB 4Rx8 RDIMM ECC 800MHz

For 32GB configurations:
- 4x 8GB 4Rx8 RDIMM ECC 800MHz

Is my interpretation correct? Does a 32GB configuration only support 800Mhz? If so I wonder if it's just better to get 16GB at 1333MHz?

If anyone could help me verify if all this is correct it would be a amazing!
Thank you!

 

[BlueFox]

You're pretty much spot on as far as I remember. 1156 was very picky when it came to RAM unfortunately. When it first launched, x4 RAM was far more prevalent and cheaper, but incompatible. It was even worse if you wanted to use a desktop CPU (non-Xeon) as then you are stuck with UDIMMs only. Presumably you're using a Xeon on account of how much they cost at this point.

 

[Warsong]

Thanks for replying. That's good to know. I picked up an old Xeon processor so that I could benefit from ECC. Now I just have to make a decisions on speed vs quantity.