Gigabyte i-RAM 2 Information

I have been trying to get through this whole thread but there is a lot of information. Basically I would say I am a home power user... no major server stuff but just apps like photoshop etc. My main activities are just browsing, music, etc... I am considering getting the iRam but want to know what everyone reccomends? I am debating between this and a 74GB raptor. The IRam would be used only as an OS drive (win xp) and everything else would be installed on a secondary drive. Also, my system has 512MB of RAM which I am assuming I should upgrade to 1GB. Any ideas? Also, what RAM would be the most ecconomical to use with the Iram. Do I need to get DRR EEC etc? Or will simple 133 work?
 
danyal711 said:
Also, my system has 512MB of RAM which I am assuming I should upgrade to 1GB.
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I think you should get to at least 2 gigs of RAM before you consider anything else.
 
Yeah, Danya, from what I've gleaned from this thread, and the other research that I've done into these(and others for the new puter, can't wait for summer research check!)

Upgrade to 2gigs of ram first. iRam maybe a cool toy, but you're going to get a better bang for your buck by getting to 2gig's of system ram first.

As for the iRam. Can use any DDR for it from my understanding, get the cheapest kind you can find without heatspreaders as those seem to cause it to wonk out. The iRam card only works with DDR atm, but even the slowest DDR ram way outstrips the performance of the SATA bus that the iRam is using to connect, so just find cheap ram, and go with it. I won't go major cheap, but I was just going to pickup 4 gigs of 'value ram' from kingston or corsair, while putting 2gigs of something like XMS or OCZ into the main system.
 
So this is what I am curious about. Why does increasing system ram to 2GB make your computer faster etc? I have 512 right now and from what I understand if my commit charge is < 512MB then adding more ram wouldnt make any difference? Or is there something i'm missing?
 
danyal711 said:
So this is what I am curious about. Why does increasing system ram to 2GB make your computer faster etc? I have 512 right now and from what I understand if my commit charge is < 512MB then adding more ram wouldnt make any difference? Or is there something i'm missing?
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If you've got 512 megs of memory, and you need to use more, you'll start swapping. You can swap for an instant and realize bad performance for a very brief period; or you can swap for hours and thrash around for hours.

So if your total commit charge never goes over 512 megs, then you're okay, sure.
 
Thats what I thought, but then why do so many people on this thread suggest getting 2gb of system ram first before the iram? Arn't they 2 completely different things if you are just going to run your OS off the Iram?
 
danyal711 said:
Thats what I thought, but then why do so many people on this thread suggest getting 2gb of system ram first before the iram? Arn't they 2 completely different things if you are just going to run your OS off the Iram?
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I see; the problem is that I'm answering the question you've asked, not the question you meant.

The answer to your underlying question is: because having more memory can make your system faster in other ways than just avoiding swapping. Putting stuff on the iRAM drive only makes reading or writing that stuff faster, specifically. Getting more system memory can make any application faster by giving it more memory to avoid swapping, or by giving the system more memory to use for file system cache, as well. That can even help files that are individually too big to fit on the iRAM.

My older notes in this thread were about not using an i-RAM to host the swap file; that just doesn't make sense, since the memory would be better used on the system itself. If you want to use it to hold frequently run programs or other frequently accessed files, I guess you might find a case for it -- but if those files are truly frequently referenced, I'd expect the system cahce to help just as much as the i-RAM does.

Using it as temporary workspace for programs that spool seems like a good idea.

If you're planning on building a system with an i-RAM, you might want to do some benchmarks to see where the benefits come from.
 
J-Mag said:
I saw this the other day: http://www.ddrdrive.com/ddrdrive_prototype.html

I emailed the PR rep and asked what bus they will be using for data transfer and he replied stating that it definately will be using the PCI Express bus. I believe this will smoke the iRAM.
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I think they should make the spaces betwen the slots different, or vertical, or something so that you could use memory with heat spreaders on it. Just think, if there were more space between tehm, theres one more thing to watercool. :D

 
Don't think so. If there was a cheap version that worked with 4GB DDR2 sticks, maybe there could be a market for this now. The only other consumer RAMdisk I know of is the Hyperdrive, but that costs $2500 and provides fairly mediocre performance compared to a couple good SSDs.

Are there software tools to essentially use system memory as a disk? With newer motherboards having six slots you could potentially stuff quite a bit of memory in there, and you wouldn't have to fight with seperate hardware at all. I am aware that there's still the issue of keeping that ram powered...
 
Kaldskryke said:
Are there software tools to essentially use system memory as a disk? With newer motherboards having six slots you could potentially stuff quite a bit of memory in there, and you wouldn't have to fight with seperate hardware at all. I am aware that there's still the issue of keeping that ram powered...
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Yes, there are. What fight do you anticipate?
 
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