Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage

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...