all right time for a build 8700k
check z370 motherboard
check two RAM
one stick hold on we'll be back
where the devil is all the RAM
and that's actually a terrific question
dram has been in a global shortage
allegedly due to collusion between the major producers for months so
when Intel reached out asking for some
creative ideas for a sponsored video we pitched using their optane caching
modules as a way of topping up your system memory
and for some reason pig green lit this
so let's give it a shot
so obviously we're still gonna need some system memory but the plan really is to
take this and use it to replace some of
this and the rationale behind this is actually a lot less crazy than you'd
think in our testing we've seen that optane
performs more like RAM than it does like
an SSD which is to say that it's got ridiculously low response times compared
to this all while being much cheaper than this
and conveniently even though our optane module here plugs
into an m.2 slot so this is something that is designed for an SSD
Windows already has functionality that
lets us use a regular old
storage device as an extension of the
system memory so we will give up quite a
lot of our throughput compared to actual RAM
but for small transactions that might
not actually hurt us that much and it will certainly be faster than using a
traditional NVMe or SATA SSD or
heaven forbid a hard drive in this role
to put this theory to the test we're gonna do something a little bit strange
so we've actually installed two eight gig sticks of memory in our bench to
give us the benefit of dual channel but then we're gonna use Windows built-in ms
config utility to artificially
limit our memory to four gigs
without a plus sign in there
so our four gig entry actually gives us just shy of three gigs of usable memory
all right let's fire up some gaming benchmarks
these numbers actually start out showing
little concern for the lack of available RAM
however in the open world far cry 5 we
see a significant drop in 97th percentile frame rates as assets load in
on the fly as for unigine's superposition we did see a small dip but
that could just be due to run to run variation
moving on to productivity things get
painful adobe premiere took a whopping three
times longer than our native 16 gig
tests and blender is much the same story
taking over two hours to complete where
our non-limited testing gave us a result under 45 minutes
let's hope for Intel's sake that things go a little bit better
with optane
unsurprisingly our gaming results
don't really change much though we do gain back most of our 97th
percentile frames on far cry 5 compared to the 3 gig test and unigine
superposition did pick up a cool 33 points of probably run to run
variants moving on to productivity things look
well actually a lot better we shave about a minute off of adobe
premiere though we didn't get that close to true
RAM but as for blender wow
blender took a whole hour off the render
time i mean to be clear that still 25 and a
half minutes longer than if we had all just RAM
but considering that this render calls for a minimum of 12 gigs of RAM and
takes about 12 and a half we know that a
considerable amount of our working data was sitting in our optane module
but that's only part of the story let's take an even closer look at these
results what you're looking at now is a scatter
plot of frame times and the corresponding disk activity where we can
see that most of our spikes in
instantaneous frame times so these would be perceived as hitches
are actually caused by spikes in activity and this is especially evident
when we look at far cry 5. we can also look at how the relationship
works between drive activity and CPU
usage during our premiere and blender tests where we can see well mostly a
mess but but squint harder look at this
the dips in drive activity actually correspond to spikes in CPU usage
meaning our CPU is being kept fed so the
less a drive thrashes the more our CPU
gets to work nowhere is this more apparent than our
blender test where our non-optane result had the CPU working at below 50 capacity
most of the time so what can we take away here
well for one octane memory modules aren't going to be replacing system RAM
anytime soon but
think of the potential out of necessity it's common practice
for computing workloads to be coded around the availability of modern
hardware so we needed to create a pretty contrived experiment to show such a
clear benefit today but imagine if developers or creative
types or researchers were free to create
much larger data sets knowing that they'd have a cost-effective way to work
around bottlenecking their CPU we actually saw this in action in our
optane 900p video so for today we're still recommending
optane modules for accelerating slower storage devices like hard drives
but this was a really fun exercise in future
crafting and it really shows off the potential of the underlying optane
memory so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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