16GB Optane as Pagefile in AMD rig.

daglesj

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Okay been wanting to try an Optane as a Pagefile SSD for a while. Managed to pick up a 16GB on Amazon for £18 this week.

It's for my other half's rig and I had installed a 32GB Transcend M.2 SATA SSD in there.

So how do they compare?

Here is the 32GB Transcend -
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And the 16GB Optane -

269af49d-0524-4343-a708-82fd2b8f465d_zpsbpcrizia.jpg


A reasonable improvement! I didn't bother to test it in my X99 rig but I guess it might perform 5-10% faster there.
 
If you need the extra ram it’s handy, but I think it functions best as an L2 cache (see primocache for example)

The 32gb version is faster again.
 
If you need the extra ram it’s handy, but I think it functions best as an L2 cache (see primocache for example)

The 32gb version is faster again.

Yeah but the 32GB version is still £52 at which point it's still too much.

Plus we don't have any rust spinners in this machine.
 
Okay been wanting to try an Optane as a Pagefile SSD for a while. Managed to pick up a 16GB on Amazon for £18 this week.

A reasonable improvement! I didn't bother to test it in my X99 rig but I guess it might perform 5-10% faster there.

Think you need kably lake and newer to use it so might not work on x99.
 
Think you need kably lake and newer to use it so might not work on x99.

Not if you want it to work as a normal SSD. Which is kind of the point of this thread. It will work on X99 just fine. Just not as a HDD Cache drive.
 
Yeah but the 32GB version is still £52 at which point it's still too much.

Plus we don't have any rust spinners in this machine.

Even so, for random reads it’s very quick, so as read cache for a sata ssd or even an nvme, it can be worthwhile for most desktop workflows
 
you have a 16 gig 800p? I'm a bit lost also.

I'm saying you have a 16 gig 800p, if you add primocache to it/the system and allocate that as L2, you'll benefit more than just using a page file on the optane unless you're exceeding your main memory capacity.
 
Ahhh no.

I have a 16GB ORIGINAL Optane Cache drive, not an 800P.

A 58GB 800P is about £150 here in the UK.
 
Not really as all of my tests are with the 32gb original version. I just didn't realise the 800p name only just came in
 
Not really as all of my tests are with the 32gb original version. I just didn't realise the 800p name only just came in
Size really isn't a huge consideration - 16 gig of cache is a lot.
 

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I guess I don’t see the point. Does this workload page frequently? Ideally, if you’ve built the system correctly, you DONT page, period. Save for maybe certain Enterprise workloads.
 
I guess I don’t see the point. Does this workload page frequently? Ideally, if you’ve built the system correctly, you DONT page, period. Save for maybe certain Enterprise workloads.


That's not how Windows 10 works anymore. You used to be able to dump a Pagefile with Windows Vista/7 etc. if you had plenty of RAM. But 10 will kick up if you don't have one or one of a decent size even if you have 16GB+. Certain applications and software trip the Commit Size even if you are just using 8GB of your 16GB of RAM. Windows 10 makes far more use of compression and caching. I think it may well be due to them bringing out those horrible 2GB RAM/32GB SSD machines a couple of years ago. They had to make Windows more 'flexible' with low resource machines.
 
Looks great, but are you actually swapping that much where that kind of an upgrade made a difference? If using it as a caching drive, what your cache hit ratios? If you are reading data that much, then those speeds will help, but if you are constantly refreshing your cache tables, the write speeds are important. The write speeds between optane and non optane were a small jump faster, but not much.
 
Looks great, but are you actually swapping that much where that kind of an upgrade made a difference? If using it as a caching drive, what your cache hit ratios? If you are reading data that much, then those speeds will help, but if you are constantly refreshing your cache tables, the write speeds are important. The write speeds between optane and non optane were a small jump faster, but not much.


It was £18 and we had a spare slot. ;)

Sometimes you do stuff just because...

At the end of the day the burst rate and latency is also much much better. It all helps.
 
That's not how Windows 10 works anymore. You used to be able to dump a Pagefile with Windows Vista/7 etc. if you had plenty of RAM. But 10 will kick up if you don't have one or one of a decent size even if you have 16GB+. Certain applications and software trip the Commit Size even if you are just using 8GB of your 16GB of RAM. Windows 10 makes far more use of compression and caching. I think it may well be due to them bringing out those horrible 2GB RAM/32GB SSD machines a couple of years ago. They had to make Windows more 'flexible' with low resource machines.

Hmm. I’ve looked to see if any of my W10 boxes page and they generally don’t, at all. But I could be missing some times when they might be.
I usually always set a small, fixed 2GB or 4GB PF. With plenty of 900p Optane capacity to spare, I guess I could up that size to 8GB or so..
 
Hmm. I’ve looked to see if any of my W10 boxes page and they generally don’t, at all. But I could be missing some times when they might be.
I usually always set a small, fixed 2GB or 4GB PF. With plenty of 900p Optane capacity to spare, I guess I could up that size to 8GB or so..


I think its the old adage YMMV. I was finding with a 256/256MB Pagefile (well I wanted software to use that 16GB of DDR4 and have used a 256MB page for years) that when running say Fallout 4/Firefox and a couple of other things Fallout would crash out with low memory warnings even though I was running only half of my 16GB. Checking Event Viewer it was Commit Charge that was causing the issue. There is actual RAM that the software uses then another huge chunk Windows 10 puts 'on hold' for it seemingly through the Pagefile but kind of hidden.

Setting the Pagefile to System Managed cured it. Sure I could have gone to a 2GB/2GB Page but I couldn't be bothered by then.
 
It's a cool toy if nothing else.

Regarding page files, Windows has always practiced strict accounting - you can't overcommit like on linux. Just because you need a page file, it doesn't mean you are actually paging.
 
I'm confused... isn't the idea to basically never use the pagefile?
 
It was £18 and we had a spare slot. ;)

Sometimes you do stuff just because...

At the end of the day the burst rate and latency is also much much better. It all helps.

Totally makes sense.
 
I'm confused... isn't the idea to basically never use the pagefile?

Yep, but Windows 10 runs it all quite differently in the background. Basically the best option is to leave it at default System Managed settings rather than try to out think it.
 
Yep, but Windows 10 runs it all quite differently in the background. Basically the best option is to leave it at default System Managed settings rather than try to out think it.


Right, but running an optane page file should give you nothing at all, unless you run out of physical memory.
 
You can Google as well as I can...:cool:

Well, that's the problem, smartass. This has been a long debate over 2 decades. With not a lot of definitive proof either way. If you've found some magical W10-specifc data that you're preaching, do share, or else you're just blending into the 2-decade old debate. :)
 
who needs a pagefile? You should be buying enough RAM to prevent pagefile usage and growth.
 
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