Did someone just mention the words Intel.. and compatibility in the same sentence? If you are buying intel you must be prepared to toss the whole rig in a few months because they make the chipsets and processors incompatible every 4months.

Well on the one hand it's nice that they exploit advantages of the AMD memory controller, on the other hand.. now even the DDR2 RAM becomes platform-specific, if you buy this you can't switch to intel without losing your investment.. great

You can never have too much

People, if you're not going to use the full word, you need to pay attention to your cases. Gb and GB are NOT the same. [Quite true, Ed. Gb=gigabit, GB gigabyte. Can't get the staff, you know.]

A 12Gb, 16Gb or even 24Gb single stick of memory would be ideal for workstation/servers used in Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or moldflow. 

Replacing the 4Gb sticks with the higher capacity would increase the solving demand on these machines. 

I work in an office - and it doesn't stop there, no. Its an office where we have alot of 8 cored 3ghz workstations from the Fruity-Themed Company, all with xp64 and 16 gb of ram. 

64bit lightwave...cool.
64bit maya...cool.
64bit realflow...ok.
32bit photoshop...annoying.

a scene using 12gb of ram in maya. Fine. Same in lightwave? Cool. Photoshop trying to do massive matte paintings? 3.2gb. oh.