Ramdisk for gaming?

[Jared701]

I do not know much about ramdisks but from what I've read I can get software to tell windows that x% of my ram should be seen as a harddrive every time I boot. The benchmarks I've seen from this look astounding... well over 10x faster than current hard drives if the benchmarks I've seen are right. For games which require accessing the hard drive A LOT would I see a significant improvement with creating a ramdisk to hold the entire game? I believe I can simply copy the game folder from the hard drive to the ramdrive everytime I loaded windows? I know this would require a LOT of ram for most current games and then that memory would not be used as memory, but I'm wondering how much of a performance gain I would see. In one MMORPG I play players can teleport around the map and must then load all that new information before the new area is loaded.

I'm just wondering if everything I have stated is correct or are there other factors to consider? I know for going above 4 gigs of ram I'd need to go with a 64 bit OS. Does increasing ram from 2 to 8 or 16 gigs and using it as a ramdisk increase power usage a ton?

 

[OmegaAvenger]

I do not know much about ramdisks but from what I've read I can get software to tell windows that x% of my ram should be seen as a harddrive every time I boot. The benchmarks I've seen from this look astounding... well over 10x faster than current hard drives if the benchmarks I've seen are right. For games which require accessing the hard drive A LOT would I see a significant improvement with creating a ramdisk to hold the entire game? I believe I can simply copy the game folder from the hard drive to the ramdrive everytime I loaded windows? I know this would require a LOT of ram for most current games and then that memory would not be used as memory, but I'm wondering how much of a performance gain I would see. In one MMORPG I play players can teleport around the map and must then load all that new information before the new area is loaded.

I'm just wondering if everything I have stated is correct or are there other factors to consider? I know for going above 4 gigs of ram I'd need to go with a 64 bit OS. Does increasing ram from 2 to 8 or 16 gigs and using it as a ramdisk increase power usage a ton?

increasing the amount of ram in your system will not significantly affect the amount of power your computer uses. nor will upgrading to a 64-bit os. It would a marginal increase in power consumption

That said, you will need 8 or more if you plan to fit pretty much any current game into a ram drive. I'd for go the 16 if you've got the money. Also I'm sure there's a ram disk program that can automatically copy the data from your hard drive to the ram drive on boot up.