Hardware bottlenecks in lighting control systems: Has anyone pushed their setup this far?

[fipex10696]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been a long-time fan of using Zero 88 consoles for my live production setups, but lately, I’ve been looking into upgrading the server hardware that sits behind my complex visual and lighting environments. As I start integrating more media servers and heavy-duty real-time rendering software into my workflow, I’ve found that my current hardware is starting to show its age.

I’m currently planning a massive workstation upgrade and I’m curious if anyone here has experience with extreme-density memory configurations for lighting control servers. I’m looking at moving to a setup with 256GB of DDR5-5600MHz (PC5 44800) memory. It feels like a massive leap, but I’ve noticed that when running multiple high-resolution pixel-mapping outputs alongside my console software, my current system occasionally stutters during complex scene changes.

One specific point I’m worried about is the memory latency; while the bandwidth on these PC5 44800 kits is fantastic, I wonder if the sheer size—running 256GB total—might introduce stability quirks I haven't accounted for in a production environment. I’ve always focused on the reliability of the lighting hardware itself, but it seems like in our modern age, the console is only as stable as the workstation pushing the data.

Has anyone here experimented with scaling their server memory to these kinds of levels, or do you find that for professional lighting control, we are still better off with smaller, faster, and more streamlined configurations? Is the overhead of such a high memory capacity even necessary for our industry, or am I just over-engineering my rig?