As I understand it, the number of active instruments determines the CPU useage you'll need.  But from what I gather, your template size (and therefor number of libraries) is dependent on huge amounts of RAM.  Right now I'm building a slave machine and wondering what the limit in terms of library size is for 128gb of ram.  The chipset I'm looking at right now supports up to 256gb.

The real premium though is the hard drives, which are NVME and wouldn't be on consumer boards (HP Workstation).  So if I'm limited to only a few terabytes of libaries, then it would make sense to me to shift my hardware requirements into a cheaper chipset.  This chipset would only pay off if I could have say 16TB of libraries supported on it (I do not have that right now!).

So I'm planning a slave build here and I'm wondering how this works before I get into this.  I have no problems building a 128GB machine, but I'm wondering how large of a library that will support?  The number of active instruments I use at any time is not enormous (50 tracks), but I'm curious how the templates scale over time with this.

I'm new to this world, but as I understand it, template size is highly dependent on RAM, regardless of active instruments.  And template size is somewhat a function of library size.

So I guess I'm wondering the "node" limit of 128gb or 256gb in terms of libraries.  I'd like to limit my nodes and obviously price my builds around these realities. 

Right now I have my eyes on an i9-10980XE which supports up to 256gb of ram.

Any help is appreciated!