Final Words

Armed with four 1GB sticks, we ran into more than a few cases where the i-RAM's size limitations made it impractical for use in our system.  Although 4GB is enough for a good deal of applications, an 8GB card would get far more use.  Based on the size of applications and games that we tried installing on the card, we'd say that 8GB would be the sweet spot - which unfortunately would either take two cards or much more expensive DIMMs.  We wouldn't recommend going with a 2GB partition unless you have a very specific usage model that you know won't use any more.  With only 2GB, we quickly found ourselves very constrained for space.  The past few years of having much more storage than we could ever ask for has unfortunately made us forget about how tough things can get with only a couple of GBs of space. 

Although the card is presently cramped with just four DIMM slots, one option for Gigabyte is to introduce a two-slot version with support for eight DIMMs.  The problem that we foresee most people running into is that older memory may be plentiful, but is usually smaller in size.  By the time current Athlon 64 users migrate to DDR2, they may have a handful of 512MB or 1GB sticks laying around, but presently, the only spare memory that you're most likely to have is a few 128MB or 256MB DDR modules from older builds.  Without being able to re-use older memory, the cost of outfitting an i-RAM card with a full 4GB of memory starts getting expensive.  At $90 per gigabyte of memory, you're talking about $360 just in memory costs, plus another $150 for the card itself.  For most folks, that's a pretty steep entry fee, but then again, if you've just splurged on a GeForce 7800 GTX, then maybe your budget can handle it. 

But that right there hits the nail on the head; by no means is the i-RAM a cheap upgrade, but then again, neither is an Athlon 64 X2, or a brand new 7800 GTX, or an SLI motherboard.  If you put it in perspective, an i-RAM with 4GB of brand new DDR400 memory isn't all that expensive compared to some of the other upgrades that we've recommended recently.  So the question then becomes, is Gigabyte's i-RAM as important to your overall system performance as an Athlon 64 X2 or a GeForce 7800 GTX?

For gamers, there is a slight improvement in level load times if you keep your game on the i-RAM.  Most games will fit on a 4GB card, but as we noticed during our testing, not all will.  The reduction in load times isn't nearly as dramatic as we had originally thought. It seems as if level load times are actually more affected by CPU and platform performance than just disk performance. 

Those users who have one or two applications that occupy all of their time, and tend to take a while to load or work with due to constant disk access would be more than happy with the i-RAM.  By far, the biggest performance improvements we saw when using the i-RAM were obviously with disk intensive operations such as file copying.  If your applications or usage models involve a lot of data movement without much manipulation, then the i-RAM may very well be what you need. 

At the same time, for all of the situations where the i-RAM was quite useful, there were a number where it wasn't.  Multitasking performance went up, but only in one out of the three Winstone tests, and even then, it's going to be rather tough to install a large number of applications on the i-RAM due to its size limitations, so your multitasking performance benefits will be numbered.  Game load times weren't always improved by a great deal and as we saw with the Business and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone tests, sometimes you are better off with a faster CPU than with the i-RAM. 

The important thing to focus on is that thanks to Gigabyte's battery system, data-loss was never an issue during our use of the card; and despite the lack of ECC memory support, we never had any data corruption during our testing. 

In the end, the i-RAM is an interesting addition to a system, but it's usefulness will truly vary from one user to the next.  With a bit more capacity, and especially for those users who happen to have a few 1GB sticks laying around, the i-RAM could be a very powerful addition to your system. Hats off to Gigabyte for making something useful, and we can't wait to see rev 2...

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  • mattsaccount - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    This thing would still be useful as a pagefile in some circumstances--if all your memory slots were full and/or you had extra memory lying around. This is what I had been planning to do with it (currently have 4x512mb, plus a couple other smaller capacity DDR sticks which would be nice to use b/c for photoshop stuff). But the price is too high. I'll wait till it drops.
  • Son of a N00b - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I would love to get two of them and run them in RAID-5 possibly...that way you also have a back up...

  • Gatak - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    You'd need minimum 3 cards/disks for RAID-5.

    However, using this card as a journaling device for a normal filesystem, like ReiserFS or Reiser4 might be very beneficial. Wouldn't require much RAM either.
  • ukDave - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    Extra things that could have been covered were:

    Would there be a difference with other SATA cards, such as 3Ware etc - i.e. would CPU usage make a difference perhaps?
    Why not use SATA-IO (SATA-2) instead of the older and slower SATA (re: Gigabyte)?

    But otherwise a very informative article, thanks Anand.
  • ss284 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    It would be best to wait for the second version of the card, which will hopefully have a cheaper IC as well as sata II support. Theres no doubt that the ram can do 3.0gb/s.

    Imagine what 2 of these in raid 0 would be like.


    -Steve
  • SDA - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    - File copy performance is mostly a moot point, because copying files from disk to disk will go as fast as the slower of the two can, and other applications that typically require disk performance (unarchiving et al) will only see a minimal performance increase due to bottlenecks in other parts of the system (which becomes even less valuable when you consider that you won't be doing a whole lot of unarchiving to a disk that small).

    - Gaming benefit would be okay if it you could fit more than about one modern game on it.

    - Using it as a pagefile is, as Anand noted, pointless.

    - It does improve boot times, but it's not a huge difference, how many of us shut down often enough to actually be bothered by a few seconds in boot?

    - It does improve app loading times slightly, but if you're opening and closing apps that take a lot to open and close, it's probably because you don't have enough system memory, so buy more memory instead.

    So basically: whoopee.
  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link

    I'm just gonna pick at a single point ... you could install one game to the i-ram at a time and then archive them on another drive.

    You get fast zip times on i-ram and a single file transfer to a magnetic disk is faster than multiple small files (moving the the archive won't take long). Just unzip the game you want to play to i-ram ...

    but then ... that kinda defeats the purpose doesn't it ...

    I could see this being fun to play with, but I have to agree with Anand -- it needs higher capacity before it is really useful.

    Plus, I'd like to see SATA-II :-)
  • miketheidiot - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I don't really see anyone using this, its costs way too much for too little storage and too little performance benefit, not to mention the risk of data loss. I'll give it a look again when they get some higher bandwidth flash or something like that. this i can pass on for now.
  • Sea Shadow - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I dunno, I could see the extreme enthusiasts getting these. I mean after all, if they have the money to buy a system with SLI 7800 GTX and FX 57 this would be pocket change.
  • BoberFett - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I'd imagine that in some areas the CPU is still the bottleneck and for others the 150MB/sec limit of SATA may be.

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