well guys I've been promising to do something with a RAM drive for quite a
while so check this out in this system
this is with a P9 x79 deluxe from ASUS
and 64 gigs of gskill rip Jaws Z memory so
here I'm going to try and show you guys the ah yes there we go can get in there
so this is an 1866 32 gig kit times 2
it's rated at cl9 and 1.5 Vol so this is
an extremely extremely Bend extremely
high performance kit however I'm running them at, 1600 I haven't tried them at
1866 cuz when you pair them up sometimes you have to go a little bit less
aggressive on things so designed for Intel LGA 2011 processors and x79
platform so why would you need 64 gigs of memory see there's the spec on that
right there so I got eight sticks two kits why on Earth would you need 64 gigs
of RAM well if you're doing some really hardcore 3D work I guess you could need
them obviously not for gaming so just so
that's real clear guys obviously not for gaming hardcore 3D stuff hardcore video
editing really hardcore photo editing
there you go that's what the system looks like with 64 gigs of RAM in it
sweet um or an alternate use and this is
what I'm actually using it for is if you wanted to set up a RAM drive so I'm
going to show you guys how I used the AMD software which you can get for just
a couple bucks it's actually not that expensive it's called radon RAM disk
Radeon RAM dis Configuration utility so this just runs in the
background nothing out of the ordinar this is just a branded uh this is just a
branded RAM disk software it's not actually developed by AMD so here you go
you set how much of your memory you want oh yeah right I wanted to show you guys so we've got a
3960x at 4 GHz in here it's uh you can't
see that cuz it's not actually underload but don't worry about it then we here we
go so memory I guess you can call it 65 gigs at this point instead of 64 gigs
but there we go 1600 megaherz 99924 command rate 2T 1.5 volts only so
just B crazy crazy crazy stuff okay anyway so back to the Configuration
utility so I set I set aside 48 gigs of
memory as a RAM disc so what happens is when
the system loads up we load the dis image off which is saved to the C drive
which is an SSD then when the system shuts down we save to that same image
and we can actually autosave it at any moment it doesn't take that long to save
so I'll just show you guys how long it takes to save it's not that bad and the
RAM dis is actually full now so I have a whole whack load of games installed on
it as well as actually oh that means
since I last saved it I have added um
almost the full 50 gigs worth of stuff so it might actually take a little while
I guess we're going to find out how long it takes let the record show The Time Is
Now 9:21 okay so here we go computer RAM
disk so I've loaded up 40 gigs of it with a bunch of stuff including a few
Steam games as well as the full Adobe
CS6 Master Suite so uhuh that's what I
meant to do uh huh oh it's not letting
me access it right now because it's saving so I'll be back back in a moment
let's find out how long that takes that took about 10 minutes which
means that guys it will take a little longer to shut down your computer than
normal and if you want to set up the autosave option I would probably run a
separate disc for your RAM dis cache like a small SSD maybe a 60 or 64 gig so
that you don't have to worry about the Slowdown on your boot drive while it's doing it you can see that on your boot
drive I'm just saving to my boot Drive there's now a RAM disk. IMG that's an
image that takes up well the bulk of my
boot SSD now uh so here you can see also
though that I have a 46 gig RAM disc available with five well about six gigs
free and the image only takes up around 41 gigs so it only uses as much space as
you're actually using on the RAM disk to Cache it it doesn't just uh store blank
space as uh as occupying your your boot SSD so now that we've done this let's
have a look oh yeah I wanted to show you guys where to get it as well so down
download that's a different one radon Ramis so you just go to radon risk.com
and you can see here they actually say this is a data RAM product so it's just
rebranded you can get it for free for up to 4 gigs of RAM disc and if you have
AMD memory installed you can create up to a 6 gig RAM disc for for no extra
charge so that's pretty cool and then to actually buy the software uh only cost a
few bucks I think it's 20 or 20 bucks or something like that yeah not that bad 20
bucks to get the full version which allows you to create up to a 64 gig RAM
disc so that's what I'm using the full version so let's do a couple quick demos
shall we let's go ahead and close all this stuff down space sniffer is Awesome
by the way guys if you aren't using it already you should allows you to track
down where all your space is being used up so here is my steam drive but here
here's a cool demo so I installed CS6
and we are going to launch Photoshop CS6
64-bit here we go boom done holy crap that was
Photoshop H don't mind this this is because I'm just using a trial so that
that doesn't count that doesn't count in our load time so let's go ahead just to
make sure it wasn't a fluke you know what here here just to ensure you that
it wasn't a fluke I'm going to fire up something that I haven't opened yet
Illustrator CS6
and illustr oh shoot oh okay yeah there
we go never mind illustrator is open all
right last but not at least I OB Premier
so these are all actually oh office is installed on a different drive so these
are all installed directly on the RAM drive so Premier
Pro and I mean look at those loading screens go done well okay it was done
but I exited it so now let's fire up some Steam games so Crisis crisis is a
good one because the load the save games actually take quite a while to load now
I don't know that I'm actually saving the the save games to the RAM dis but
the game itself is loading off the RAM dis so any teex or whatever else are
going to be able to load off of that RAM disc come on game let's go go
crisis it's like yeah my system has you know 46 gigs of memory based storage and
then the the the the the joke is but but can it run
crisis okay I haven't seen it do this before system just lock up out
right number lock not working we'll be back
all right so if you guys have played crisis at all we're back by the way took a little
while got everything working again if you played crisis at all you have some
idea that you know the game takes a little while to load I mean is it the
difference between you know not waiting
for it to load at all and waiting for it to load for you know a billion hours no
but that is a lot faster than I'm sure you guys have ever seen a crisis game
load because it is loading off the ramp
which is very very very cool so let's go ahead and sort of can that of course
everything is super responsive because everything is running off of RAM which
is of course very fast so we can go ahead and fire up another game another
game that I uh also enjoy the long loading times of is the Elder Scrolls 5
Skyrim so let's go ahead and play the
game see this is the thing that kills me no matter how fast your system is you're
always going to wait for stupid loading screens just
freaking ridiculous okay so let's find a game loaded I think that's the test game
yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever and here we
go so does the RAM Drive make a difference the answer is absolutely it
does it definitely makes a difference is it the difference between you know your
computer being usable and your computer being totally not usable no it is not
however uh it's very very cool RAM is so cheap these days that it's not
necessarily a terrible upgrade and
honestly while I while I really like the idea and while I really am sort of
enjoying the experience while I'm playing around with it I wouldn't necessarily recommend this particular
configuration where you actually have a dedicated RAM dis for the applications
that you use very frequently because there's a couple things so number one you saw me corrupt the RAM dis already
on my own here so there is the there's the potential for things to go wrong so
I wouldn't use it for anything Mission critical and number number two is the
fact that it's just not that useful it slows down your your shutdown it slows
down your boot up and you can't really do anything with the stuff that's on
that drive until it's done um whereas if
you were using it as a cache so there's another there's another application
called Fancy cache that is that is very looks very cool as well because it
allows you to use that RAM dis to Cache your boot drive so you could actually
have a instead of using an SSD to cash your hard drive you could be using RAM
to cash your SSD which would obviously be very very Snappy so I think that
pretty much wraps this up I haven't tried the other one yet although I've heard very good things about it thank
you for checking out my sort of performance test of what it's like to
run things off of a RAM disk using like a ludicrous amount of uh 64 gigs of
gskill memory on my test bench here I'm going to turn up the gain here so you
guys can actually see what they look like don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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