In theory the Gigabyte I-ram is a pretty cool device – mount 4 sticks of ram on a PCI card and attach a sata cable, and viola, you’ve got a solid state hard disk. If you’re careful you could install windows and the swap partition to the thing and see enhanced performance, and at current ram prices you could build a 4GB one for under $400 if you shop carefully. I used to use a similar approach on macintoshs back in the system 7 days and it definitely did increase performance back then. Techreport.com runs the device through a battery of tests and basically conclude that it works though not to the level of performance one would hope for. It’s too bad the thing doesn’t support Sata II and larger ram sizes, but even with its current limitations and $149 price it’s a tempting toy. Who knows, maybe I could use it to speed up the glacial map loading times in Battlefield 2, from the test results at techreport it looks like this thing would help a lot with that.
I read mixed reviews on this thing. Like loading windows on it really didn’t help, but what would be useful is moving your pagefile to it.
If I can find the review I read I will post the link
And I agree with the BF2 map loading times are HEINOUS, though since I added another 512 mb of ram (totalling 1.5 gb now of Kingston Hyper X PC3200) things are smoother and when I exit the game it releases the memory faster. I used to have audio playing (game sounds that is) for about 15 seconds after I exited BF2 and got back to the desktop.
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