i-RAM for Applications

Gamers aren't the only ones plagued by long load times. There are a handful of applications that do take a reasonable amount of time to load that could be benefitted by being installed on an i-RAM card.

We tried a wide variety of applications, everything from Office to Photoshop and 3ds max. What we found was the following: for the most part, the majority of applications are as fast as they are going to get on any current-generation SATA drive. We noticed no performance difference loading any of the MS Office applications on a Raptor or on the i-RAM card.

Application Load Time Comparison (Lower is Better)
Adobe Photoshop CS
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft Excel 2003
Gigabyte i-RAM (4GB)
3.537s
2.51s
1.654s
Western Digital Raptor (74GB)
6.037s
2.562s
1.765s

The biggest differences that we saw were obviously with applications that took a long time to load to begin with, one of the most popular culprits being Adobe Photoshop CS (we didn't have CS2 available at the time of testing).

On a WD Raptor, Photoshop CS took about 6 seconds to load; it's not much when you time it, but it can feel like an eternity when you're actually sitting there waiting for it. The i-RAM cut the load time down to 3.537 seconds, a significant reduction, and very noticeable.

The major issue with the i-RAM and using it to install our applications on it, once again, becomes size. But it is entirely possible to keep a handful of your very frequently used applications on the card, giving you faster access to them.

i-RAM for Gamers File Copy and Archive Performance
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  • Icehawk - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    Huh, if this was at the $50 price point it would be a bit more interesting.

    I didn't like the pagefile test - it made no sense at all. Of course going from say 4b RAM to 2gb + 2gb iRam isn't going to improve the system... You needed to test what JUST changing the pagefile from HD to iRAM does.What about a typical 1gb RAM setup that most of us use? I still hit the pagefile on occasion and I do have ~1gb of old DDR I could use. Load times? No, I'd like to know if it smooths out gameplay. I know Doom 3 hiccups on my machine due to disk accesses.

    Otherwise this doesn't look like it makes a lot of sense in its current incarnation.
  • lewis71980 - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    No mention of using JBOD instead of Raid 0.

    That way with 4 pci slots used up you could get 16gb.

    Maybe that would be enough space to do some proper server / databases.

    Use a pair of normal 80 IDE HDD for os boot in raid 1 with file backup, from the i Ram card.

  • Braxus - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    Know the article says it doesn't support ECC memory but will it still take it and run in in non-ECC mode? Most mobos I believe can at least do this. What about registered memory? Got a couple sticks of 1GB DDR266 RECC memory I'd like to use!
  • RMSistight - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I definitely won't purchase this product until they implement SATA-II at 300Gb/s. Why should I shell out $150 for SATA150 when my DFI LanParty Ultra-D can do 300.

    I even asked one of the product managers at the AMD tech tour. I don't see why they wouldn't do it since SATA-II is backwards compatible to SATA-I.
  • Hacp - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    BTW I hate this new layout. i have to click it to read the next comment. Is there anyway to fix this? also the forums didn't get a makeover visual wise.
  • LeftSide - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I wonder If the athlon x2 would have shown a diffrence in the multitaking tests, Instead of useing a fx57?
  • Nanobaud - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    If more benches are to be done, I would put in a suggestion to test some compile times. Then I guess you should compare it to boosting youe system memory and installing a RAM drive, but this could be more convenient if you have those old 256 / 512 MB memory sticks lying around.

    nBd
  • Sunbird - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    I want to know how long it will take the I-RAM to drain a standard UPS if the PC is off but connected to said UPS?
  • jkostans - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link

    A while. You would have to find how much power is dissipated by the i-ram, then use the capacity of your UPS to get an exact number. I would go as far as to say maybe up to a month if you have a good ups.
  • Zebo - Monday, July 25, 2005 - link

    $600 for 4GB (read useless) drive that maybe is not much faster than two 73GB drives in RAID 0 for half price? Uh Huh. If they sell 3000 I'll be shocked.

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