Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 3:50 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
i-RAM for Gamers
Although you definitely need more memory if your game is pausing during gameplay to swap to disk, level load times can be very annoying, especially with the excruciatingly long load times of some recent popular titles such as Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield 2. So, what about using the i-RAM as a "game drive" to store whatever game you happen to be playing the most at the time, and hopefully reduce those pesky load times?So, we went to test a handful of games, Splinter Cell 3, Doom 3, Battlefield 2 and UT2004, and in that quest, we ran into our first problem - UT2004 required around 5GB of space to install, and we only had 4GB on our i-RAM. The rest of our tests proceeded without a problem, but the capacity issue is one that was an underlying theme of our testing with the i-RAM: its Achilles' heel is its capacity limitation more than anything else.
Most of the games that we installed on the i-RAM occupied between 1GB and 3.5GB of space, but we wouldn't put it past many developers to begin pushing those limits very soon, if they aren't already. But then again, you could always add another i-RAM later, so how'd it fare in the games we could install on it?
| Game Level Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better) | |||||
Splinter Cell: CT |
Doom 3 |
Battlefield 2 |
|||
| Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB) | 8.0s |
19.6s |
20.83s |
||
| Western Digital Raptor (74GB) | 10.59s |
25.78s |
25.67s |
||
First off, we had Splinter Cell 3 - we ran the lighthouse benchmark that ships with the game and timed the loading screen for the level. The Raptor came in at just under 11 seconds, while the i-RAM came in at 8 seconds. Not a huge improvement, and honestly not overly noticeable (other than the fact that there was no disk crunching), but it was a measurable difference.
Doom 3 proved to be a bit more appreciative of the i-RAM's efforts; the Raptor came in at just under 26 seconds, while the i-RAM loaded the first level in 19.6 seconds. Again, if you were expecting the load time to drop to instantaneous, that's not going to happen, but the reduction in this case was quite measurable.
Our final test was the big one - Battlefield 2. For this test, we used our benchmark level and once again, timed the ever-so-long loading screen. The Raptor got us out of that screen in 25.67 seconds, and the i-RAM did it in 20.83 - a similar performance gain to what we saw in Doom 3.
Overall, we saw some reasonably tangible performance improvements in game level load times - but nothing we would characterize as spectacular. For the money, you're much better off buying a better video card to improve your gaming performance; but if you happen to already own a pair of GeForce 7800 GTXes, then maybe an i-RAM is in your future.
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crazySOB297 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I'm surprised they didn't raid a few of them... I think you could get some huge performance.Googer - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Not to mention it is a way to also get around the 4gb siza limitation.
Hacp - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
Dude the article said straight out that SATA150 was the only format supported. Read the entire article.Guspaz - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
I too am dissapointed that the article lacked any mention of SATA2, which is twice as fast as SATA (300MB/s vs 150MB/s). Considering many motherboards already on the market suport SATA2, and the 300MB/s transfer rate that goes with it, it is a bit of an oversight that the articles doesn't even MENTION if the card supports SATA2 or not. Nor do they mention what they think would happen with SATA2, or if Gigabyte is likely to produce a SATA2 version. It's a weak spot in this article, I think, considering how central the bandwidth of SATA is to the performance of the i-RAM.snorbert - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
33MHz PCI only gets you 133 MB/sec theoretical, and more like 110 MB/sec in the real world. The i-RAM with SATA 1 can completely saturate a PCI bus. SATA2 would cost more to implement, and give you no speed increase at all on a 33MHz bus. If you build the card for higher-end PCI specs (e.g. 66MHz, 64 bit, 66MHz/64bit, PCI-X) then you automatically exclude most PC enthusiasts (unless they like buying server boards for their game boxes).
If they end up doing a PCI Express version, then there would be some reason to support SATA2.
This board is not a replacement for a hard drive. It would be incredibly useful as a transaction log though. Reliable (i.e. won't get lost if the machine crashes) write-behind caching for RAID 5 drives will give you a huge boost to write speeds. And the controller cards that support battery-backed write behind caching cost a lot more money than an i-RAM.
-Jason
sprockkets - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Also to reply hereKeep in mind that for many years the ide/sata controllers are NOT on the PCI bus of the southbridge, so PCI is not a limitation.
snorbert - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
Actually, scratch my comment - I had not had enough coffee when I wrote it. I forgot that the PCI connector is doing essentially squat except providing power to this device. Of course you could have a SATA2 controller on a faster bus talking to this thing. But an SATA2 version would probably cost more. (because it would need a faster FPGA, newer SATA transceivers)Sorry folks,
Jason the doofus
Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
You did miss that reference; on page 2 it says "The i-RAM currently implements the SATA150 spec, giving it a maximum transfer rate of 150MB/s".Given the 1.6GB/s of the RAM, it seems completely silly not to provide a 300MB/s SATA interface instead, especially considering that the whole contraption including RAM will cost as much as 2 or more decent hard drives.
Anton
ryanv12 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
The controller on the card is not SATA-II...it can do a max of 1.6GB/s...not exactly SATA-II speeds there...Anton74 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link
1.6GB/s is actually more than 5 times 300MB/s, the maximum supported by SATA-II. So 300MB/s could easily be fully utilized, and I don't understand why they didn't support that.Anton