Gadgetory

alright time for a build 8700 k check Z 370 motherboard check to ram one stick what the devil is all around 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 obtained caching modules as a way of topping up your system memory and for some reason pink green witness 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 obtain 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 obtain module here plugs into an m dot 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 roll 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 as 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 super 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 obtain 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 three gig test and Unigine superposition did pick up a cool 33 points of probably run two 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's still 25 and a half minutes longer than if we had all just ramped 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 octane 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 scatterplot of frame x and the corresponding disk activity where we can see that most of our spikes in instantaneous frame x 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 they're really ship works between drive activity and CPU usage during our premier and blender tests where we can see well mostly a mess but but squint harder look at this the dips and drive activity actually correspond to spikes in CPU usage meaning our CPU is being kept fed so the less a drive Thresh's the more our CPU gets to work nowhere is this more apparent than our blender test where our non obtain result had the CPU working at below 50% capacity most of the time so what can we take away here well for one obtain 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 coated 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 obtain 900p video so for today we're still recommending octane 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 octane memory so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video 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