Gadgetory

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 isus and 64 gigs of g.skill ripjaws z memory so here i'm going to try and show you guys in the is there we go can get in there so this is an 1866 32 gig kit times 2 it's rated at CL 9 and 1.5 volts this is an extremely extremely binned extremely high performance kit however I'm running them at 1600 I haven't tried them in 1866 because when you pair them up sometimes you have to go a little bit less aggressive on things so designed for Intel LGA 2011 processors next 79 platforms so why would you need 64 gigs of memory see there's the spec on that right there so I've 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 or an alternate use and this is what I'm actually using it for is if you wanted to set up our 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 radeon ramdisk radeon ramdisk configuration utility so this just runs in the background nothing out of the ordinary this is just a branded 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 oh yeah right I want to show you guys so we've got a 39 60 X at 4 gigahertz in here it's you can't see that because it's not actually under load but don't worry about it then we here we go to memory I guess you can call it 65 gigs at this point instead of 60 for gigs but there we go 1600 megahertz nine nine nine twenty four command rate two T 1.5 volts only so just block crazy crazy crazy stuff look anyway so back to the configuration utility so I set I set aside forty eight gigs of memory as a ram disk so what happens is when the system loads up we load the disk 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 disk is actually full now so I have a whole whack load of games installed on it as well as actually all that means since I last saved it I have added 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 921 ok 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 uh-huh that's what I meant to do oh it's not letting me access it right now because it's saving so I'll be back in a moment let's find out how long that takes that took about 10 minutes which means that guys I 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 disk 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 dot IMG that's an image that takes up well the bulk of my boot SSD now so here you can see also though that I have a 46 gig ram disk available with five about 6 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 store blank space 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 download that's a different one radeon ramdisk so you just go to radeon ramdisk comm 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 four gigs of ram disk and if you have AMD memory installed you can create up to a six gig ram disk for for no extra charge so that's pretty cool and then to actually buy the software only cost a few bucks i think it's twenty or but twenty bucks or something like that yeah not that bad twenty bucks to get the full version which allows you to create up to a 64 gig ram disk 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 the stuff down space sniffer is awesome by the way you 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 I 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 insure you that it wasn't a fluke I'm going to fire up something that I haven't opened yet Illustrator cs6 and hey Lister oh shoot oh okay yeah there we go they're mine illustrator is open all right last but not least Adobe Premiere so these are all actually our office is installed on a different drive so these are all installed directly on the RAM drive so Premiere 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 Crysis Crysis is a good one because the load the saved games actually take quite a while to load now I don't know that I'm actually saving the saved games to the RAM disk but the game itself is loading off the RAM disk so any textures or whatever else are going to be able to load off of that Ram disk come on game let's go go Crysis it's like yeah my system has you know 46 gigs of memory base storage and then the joke is but but can it run Crysis oh-ho-ho-ho oh okay I haven't seen him do this before system just lock up outright number lock not working we'll be back alright 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've played prices 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 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 rub 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 also enjoy the long loading times of is the elderscrolls v 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 freakin ridiculous okay so let's find a game loaded I think that's a test game 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 it's very very cool ram is so cheap these days that it's not necessarily a terrible upgrade and honestly while i well 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 disk for the applications that you use very frequently because there's a couple things the number one you saw me corrupt the RAM disk 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 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 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 disk to cache your boot drive so you could actually have instead of using an SSD to cache your hard drive you could be using RAM to cache 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 64 gigs of g.skill memory on my test bench and turn up the gain here so you guys can actually see what they look like don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos