Honest memory question.....

[$n][pErMan]

*Note.. check sig for CURRENT specs*
Ok.. my question is, with my current specs would it be worth buying 2 more sticks of PC3200 Corsair CAS 2.5 512mb DDR (for a total of 1gb) to add to my current 1gb to make it a total of 2gb on duel channel and also disable the page file so it only ran off the ram?? Would I notice any real performce increase in game and would it be worth having for later?? (As is seems even with 64bit and SLi... PC3200 is still and will be the standard for some time). Let me know your opinions! :cool:

[Tr1cK]

I dont think it will work as you may think, unless you make a ramdrive for your swapfile. There are still some programs that require a page file just for swapping purposes. With a gig already, I dont think you will see much difference even with a page file on a ram drive.

[jolle]

Blackviper did some benchmarks with and without swapfile..
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/supertweaks.htm

no difference to mention, and going above 1Gb RAM isnt gonna show much of improvment (if any at all).
And like Tr1cK mentioned, some apps and games wont work at all without a Pagefile..

[$n][pErMan]

Alirght... I think im starting to see a pattern ... thanks :) BTW... some nice little tweaks on that page... some that I forgot about!

[Rakeesh]

Hmm...instead of swap space, there ought to be auxiliary memory slots in the motherboard where you can put huge amounts of el cheapo memory. Even memory as slow as something made in 1995 would be a hell of a lot faster than paging to a hard disk.

Would require some changes to the architecture, but if they worked it right, components of a game could be cached there for later retreival so e.g. loading times for even the biggest games are almost to the point of non existence.

[jolle]

hehe, could always get one of those expensive-as-hell flashdrives to use for the swapfile..
Those freakishly oversouped up systems at http://www.go-l.com/home/index.htm
uses, or some of them..
btw they seems to be out of business, didnt read to carefully tho..

I guess noone ever tried using volatile memories for swapfiles as you suggest Alphawolf due to their nature, powerloss would wipe the swapfile and potentially harm the OS or apps currently using it, I guess..
And I guess good programmers try to make sure the critical bits is kept in RAM instead of in the Pagefile if possible..

[$n][pErMan]

powerloss would wipe the swapfile and potentially harm the OS or apps currently using it
They could probably add something to the motherboard that would supply power for like a second (as that would be all you need) to just flush the cache onto the hard drive. Would be easy enough to do.

[jolle]

[pErMan']They could probably add something to the motherboard that would supply power for like a second (as that would be all you need) to just flush the cache onto the hard drive. Would be easy enough to do.

Yeah I guess, but then perhaps there is a cost issue or something..
And then there is the cost of the Memory for it to add to that..
And in the end it prolly wouldnt help that much, the benches didnt show any difference with the swapfile turned off and the system running entirely in RAM.

There are these really expensive and really fast flash drives, like this setup uses:
http://www.go-l.com/store/hardware/machl38.htm
they call it "PuRam", but its not their tech and its simply a Flash drive..
Bit more on that here aswell:
http://www.go-l.com/desktops/machl38/features/index.htm
Pure Solid State/Non-Volatile
33usec Access Time
Up to 8.2GB/sec Burst R/W
Up to 7.1GB/sec Sustained R/W
Over 150.000 IO/sec
Put the OS and page file on that one hehe.. they cost fortunes tho (US$80,000. for a 80gb I hear), and you prolly wont get that much out of it either, a bit more responsive OS perhaps..
Perhaps one day they drop to resonable prices..

[$n][pErMan]

Yeah I guess, but then perhaps there is a cost issue or something..
And then there is the cost of the Memory for it to add to that..
And in the end it prolly wouldnt help that much, the benches didnt show any difference with the swapfile turned off and the system running entirely in RAM.
The power would be fairly cheap... all you would need would be a supply of power for no more than a second (and thats a hell of a lot more than it would need to begin with). Also.. you could have the memory built onto the motherboard already and that would not cost to much for them to do. Max you would need is a gig (as of now)... memory is cheap to make. Plus it could have the option in the bios if it needed more to use some of the ram. As you said.. I doubt it would do much if anything for real performance.... but overtime with all the other upgrades going on in computers it could be an interesting idea. This is why im majoring in Electrical Engineering... I love this **** :D

[jolle]

hehe ok but writing 1gb onto the HD takes more then 1 second.
And you got to keep the HDs powered and the memory atleast, and perhaps the entire shebang unless you can bybass all that.
So you need some sort of battery that can keep the juice coming until you flushed 1gb onto the HD.
And some sort of system that will recover the pagefile from the HD back to the memory, well it would need a system like that anyhow as the pagefile needs to be created at every boot hehe..

Btw that kind of "power backup" could be useful as it is now with large cache HDs and powerlosses, to allow them to flush the 16mb from the cache to the HD, THAT wouldnt need alot of power, just enough the the drive itself powered for a fraction of time.


And yeah HDs are one of the slowest developing parts when it comes to speed on the PC..
As the interface keeps developing with SATA and throwing off the shackles of the PCI bus to allow more bandwidth, I would be supprised if they started making "pre-raided" HDs, sortof like 2 HDs in one packaging with integrated logic to handle it as a standalone RAID array, transparent to software or Mobo. ( abit like they are moving towards Dual core, and dual GPUs..)
But then again, pure HD speed doesnt have much to show on a consumer level, a bit shorted loadtimes overall, so it might be hard to market it in the end.
Magnetic RAM might have a hand in this as it develops, should be cheap and above all, non volitile..

[$n][pErMan]

^ Servers would JUMP all over that... more so than gamers :)