AMD Radeon RAM Disk Featuring 64GB G.Skill RipjawsZ Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,985 words · ~9 min read
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well guys I've been promising to do something with a RAM drive for quite a
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while so check this out in this system
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this is with a P9 x79 deluxe from ASUS
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and 64 gigs of gskill rip Jaws Z memory so
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here I'm going to try and show you guys the ah yes there we go can get in there
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so this is an 1866 32 gig kit times 2
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it's rated at cl9 and 1.5 Vol so this is
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an extremely extremely Bend extremely
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high performance kit however I'm running them at, 1600 I haven't tried them at
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1866 cuz when you pair them up sometimes you have to go a little bit less
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aggressive on things so designed for Intel LGA 2011 processors and x79
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platform so why would you need 64 gigs of memory see there's the spec on that
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right there so I got eight sticks two kits why on Earth would you need 64 gigs
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of RAM well if you're doing some really hardcore 3D work I guess you could need
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them obviously not for gaming so just so
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that's real clear guys obviously not for gaming hardcore 3D stuff hardcore video
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editing really hardcore photo editing
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there you go that's what the system looks like with 64 gigs of RAM in it
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sweet um or an alternate use and this is
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what I'm actually using it for is if you wanted to set up a RAM drive so I'm
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going to show you guys how I used the AMD software which you can get for just
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a couple bucks it's actually not that expensive it's called radon RAM disk
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Radeon RAM dis Configuration utility so this just runs in the
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background nothing out of the ordinar this is just a branded uh this is just a
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branded RAM disk software it's not actually developed by AMD so here you go
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you set how much of your memory you want oh yeah right I wanted to show you guys so we've got a
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3960x at 4 GHz in here it's uh you can't
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see that cuz it's not actually underload but don't worry about it then we here we
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go so memory I guess you can call it 65 gigs at this point instead of 64 gigs
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but there we go 1600 megaherz 99924 command rate 2T 1.5 volts only so
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just B crazy crazy crazy stuff okay anyway so back to the Configuration
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utility so I set I set aside 48 gigs of
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memory as a RAM disc so what happens is when
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the system loads up we load the dis image off which is saved to the C drive
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which is an SSD then when the system shuts down we save to that same image
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and we can actually autosave it at any moment it doesn't take that long to save
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so I'll just show you guys how long it takes to save it's not that bad and the
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RAM dis is actually full now so I have a whole whack load of games installed on
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it as well as actually oh that means
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since I last saved it I have added um
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almost the full 50 gigs worth of stuff so it might actually take a little while
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I guess we're going to find out how long it takes let the record show The Time Is
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Now 9:21 okay so here we go computer RAM
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disk so I've loaded up 40 gigs of it with a bunch of stuff including a few
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Steam games as well as the full Adobe
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CS6 Master Suite so uhuh that's what I
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meant to do uh huh oh it's not letting
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me access it right now because it's saving so I'll be back back in a moment
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let's find out how long that takes that took about 10 minutes which
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means that guys it will take a little longer to shut down your computer than
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normal and if you want to set up the autosave option I would probably run a
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separate disc for your RAM dis cache like a small SSD maybe a 60 or 64 gig so
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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
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drive I'm just saving to my boot Drive there's now a RAM disk. IMG that's an
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image that takes up well the bulk of my
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boot SSD now uh so here you can see also
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though that I have a 46 gig RAM disc available with five well about six gigs
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free and the image only takes up around 41 gigs so it only uses as much space as
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you're actually using on the RAM disk to Cache it it doesn't just uh store blank
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space as uh as occupying your your boot SSD so now that we've done this let's
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have a look oh yeah I wanted to show you guys where to get it as well so down
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download that's a different one radon Ramis so you just go to radon risk.com
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and you can see here they actually say this is a data RAM product so it's just
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rebranded you can get it for free for up to 4 gigs of RAM disc and if you have
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AMD memory installed you can create up to a 6 gig RAM disc for for no extra
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charge so that's pretty cool and then to actually buy the software uh only cost a
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few bucks I think it's 20 or 20 bucks or something like that yeah not that bad 20
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bucks to get the full version which allows you to create up to a 64 gig RAM
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disc so that's what I'm using the full version so let's do a couple quick demos
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shall we let's go ahead and close all this stuff down space sniffer is Awesome
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by the way guys if you aren't using it already you should allows you to track
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down where all your space is being used up so here is my steam drive but here
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here's a cool demo so I installed CS6
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and we are going to launch Photoshop CS6
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64-bit here we go boom done holy crap that was
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Photoshop H don't mind this this is because I'm just using a trial so that
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that doesn't count that doesn't count in our load time so let's go ahead just to
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make sure it wasn't a fluke you know what here here just to ensure you that
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it wasn't a fluke I'm going to fire up something that I haven't opened yet
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Illustrator CS6
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and illustr oh shoot oh okay yeah there
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we go never mind illustrator is open all
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right last but not at least I OB Premier
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so these are all actually oh office is installed on a different drive so these
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are all installed directly on the RAM drive so Premier
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Pro and I mean look at those loading screens go done well okay it was done
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but I exited it so now let's fire up some Steam games so Crisis crisis is a
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good one because the load the save games actually take quite a while to load now
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I don't know that I'm actually saving the the save games to the RAM dis but
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the game itself is loading off the RAM dis so any teex or whatever else are
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going to be able to load off of that RAM disc come on game let's go go
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crisis it's like yeah my system has you know 46 gigs of memory based storage and
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then the the the the the joke is but but can it run
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crisis okay I haven't seen it do this before system just lock up out
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right number lock not working we'll be back
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all right so if you guys have played crisis at all we're back by the way took a little
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while got everything working again if you played crisis at all you have some
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idea that you know the game takes a little while to load I mean is it the
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difference between you know not waiting
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for it to load at all and waiting for it to load for you know a billion hours no
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but that is a lot faster than I'm sure you guys have ever seen a crisis game
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load because it is loading off the ramp
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which is very very very cool so let's go ahead and sort of can that of course
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everything is super responsive because everything is running off of RAM which
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is of course very fast so we can go ahead and fire up another game another
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game that I uh also enjoy the long loading times of is the Elder Scrolls 5
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Skyrim so let's go ahead and play the
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game see this is the thing that kills me no matter how fast your system is you're
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always going to wait for stupid loading screens just
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freaking ridiculous okay so let's find a game loaded I think that's the test game
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yeah yeah yeah yeah whatever and here we
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go so does the RAM Drive make a difference the answer is absolutely it
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does it definitely makes a difference is it the difference between you know your
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computer being usable and your computer being totally not usable no it is not
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however uh it's very very cool RAM is so cheap these days that it's not
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necessarily a terrible upgrade and
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honestly while I while I really like the idea and while I really am sort of
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enjoying the experience while I'm playing around with it I wouldn't necessarily recommend this particular
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configuration where you actually have a dedicated RAM dis for the applications
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that you use very frequently because there's a couple things so number one you saw me corrupt the RAM dis already
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on my own here so there is the there's the potential for things to go wrong so
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I wouldn't use it for anything Mission critical and number number two is the
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fact that it's just not that useful it slows down your your shutdown it slows
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down your boot up and you can't really do anything with the stuff that's on
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that drive until it's done um whereas if
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you were using it as a cache so there's another there's another application
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called Fancy cache that is that is very looks very cool as well because it
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allows you to use that RAM dis to Cache your boot drive so you could actually
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have a instead of using an SSD to cash your hard drive you could be using RAM
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to cash your SSD which would obviously be very very Snappy so I think that
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pretty much wraps this up I haven't tried the other one yet although I've heard very good things about it thank
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you for checking out my sort of performance test of what it's like to
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run things off of a RAM disk using like a ludicrous amount of uh 64 gigs of
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gskill memory on my test bench here I'm going to turn up the gain here so you
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guys can actually see what they look like don't forget to subscribe to Linus
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