Anand test the iRAM

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 12:23 pm

Finally someone (in this case anandtech) has gotten their hands on a gigabyte iRam. The performance doesnt seem to be quite as good as was hoped but it still looks like a good solution for certain applications (htpc, office machine, anything else that doesnt need much storage).

here's the link

IonYz · Post by **IonYz** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 12:51 pm

$150 plus RAM and GB are only making a limited production of them. The peformance benefits were good, but once you couple the pricing and space (4 GB MAX) it becomes an iffy purchase.

Silent though

marius7 · Post by **marius7** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 1:11 pm

150 $ WTF

. So I'll stay out of this at least until SATA II version. It's too expensive.

cotdt · Post by **cotdt** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 2:18 pm

Those who wanted silent performance and have 5400RPM notebook drives can derive very nice benefit from this. Anand tests i-RAM against 10000RPM Raptor but advantage is not nearly as big as i-RAM with a slower 5400RPM notebook drive. I'm estimating my silent rig can load Photoshop 3X faster or perhaps even faster! The value of this may be difficult for some to understand, but hey it means a lot to me!

However, at its current high price and small 4GB max I'll just wait until the SATAII version comes out for much cheaper than now. BTW, 1GB sticks are available at many places for $60-$70 right now, so it's unfair to say that memory is $90 or $100 just because that's the place at certain popular retail store. 8GB version of iRAM at the original $50 price would be perfect!

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 3:04 pm

you can make it 8GB, just use 2GB sticks

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 3:06 pm

The controller only supports 4GB.

perplex · Post by **perplex** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 3:11 pm

sorry if i was mistaken

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:31 pm

qviri wrote:The controller only supports 4GB.

Just curious where you got this information from. According to GB themselves, the i-RAM can support 8GB.

The Instigator wrote:I spoke to a Giigabyte product manager and he said it could take 2GB sticks to make an 8GB drive, but its very pricey and hard to find. He also told me they are testing a lot of different RAM for compatibility and they are still expecting a release of around mid-july.

http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... 553#191553

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:35 pm

Hmm.

Anandtech said:

The i-RAM is outfitted with 4 184-pin DIMM slots that will accept any DDR DIMM. The memory controller in the Xilinx FPGA operates at 100MHz (DDR200) and can actually support up to 8GB of memory, however Gigabyte says that the i-RAM card itself only supports 4GB of DDR SDRAM. We didn’t have any 2GB unbuffered DIMMs to try in the card to test its true limit, but Gigabyte tells us it is 4GB.

Conflicting reports, I see. Sorry if I screwed anyone up.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:40 pm

Hmm, I just skimmed over Anandtech's review, I must've missed that.

TBH, I really don't know what to think. The information The Instigator posted is slightly old. It's possible Gigabyte tested the i-RAM after giving him this info with 2GB sticks, and couldn't get it to work.

qviri · Post by **qviri** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:49 pm

I don't really care, it's outside my budget anyway.

The cool factor, the sole reason for my interest currently, isn't diminished a whole lot by limiting the size to 4GB.

cotdt · Post by **cotdt** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:58 pm

My question is, are this iRAM truly silent? They told me Antec Phantom was silent but I put a microphone Amplifier next to it and can hear some coil buzz. My LCD is also not silent under the Amplifier. So I want to build a new machine that is totally silent. Is this iRAM silent? Can anybody verify? What I do know is that my current memory is dead silent even under the Amplifier, so I do have great hopes for this product. A silent storage would be great!

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 7:01 pm

qviri wrote:I don't really care, it's outside my budget anyway.

The cool factor, the sole reason for my interest currently, isn't diminished a whole lot by limiting the size to 4GB.

Plus I don't even know where/if you can buy unbuffered 2GB memory modules. Maybe in a year or two these will be available/affordable, but until then, it's not like anybody can really fill it with 8GB anyway.

cotdt · Post by **cotdt** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 7:58 pm

I've even seen 4GB sticks out. They are very tall. However, I don't remember the place that sells them and if I remember the price it was over $1200 per stick.

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Mon Jul 25, 2005 8:03 pm

Yes, I think I've seen 2GB and 4GB around, but as far as I know they are all server memory, which doesn't work on the i-RAM, which is designed for the unbuffered memory typically used in desktops. And like you mentioned, it is very pricey, pricey enough that it would likely be cheaper to purchase two i-RAM cards and deck them out with 4GB each, than one card with 8GB.

Edwood · Post by **Edwood** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:39 am

OK, so the price is DOUBLE and the capacity is HALF what they initially publicized?

Great going, Gigabyte.

Looks like this toy is going the way of Cenatek.

It benchmarks well, but overall real world performance is rather weak in comparison.

If you are rich, then this is a great idea, but it's simply too impractical and risky to use right now.

I was hoping to use it as a scratch drive for Photoshop, but looks like it is not beneficial. I will have to wait til I jump to 64 Bit Windows and Photoshop to overcome the RAM limitation.

-Ed

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 5:13 am

I think .... that Anand's benchmarks missed the point. But that's not a surprise, he made the same mistake with his dual-core benchmarks.

It matters not, at $150 they're playing silly marketing games. They can go away, think about it a bit more, and come back to me with a more sensible price (one involving two digits, not three, and in which the first digit is no larger than six).

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 6:03 am

And currency in sterling ;p
It's a shame it has to be limited by SATA speed as it has much more potential. I think real-word performance would be much better with SATAII as things like Photoshop scratch disks have a lot of sequential read (AFAIK) and games frequently load large maps, texture archives etc. rather than lots of small files like Windows.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 9:04 am

^triple the price, actually..
and chris.. £60 would be alot more than $60 so i think i'll stick with nutballs pricing

if i could have got one for not far off $50 (convertered) i would have one.. even if just to use with 1GB or so.. OS+temp files+firefox/small apps.. HDD could be off a lot of the time

why they bring out a brand new 'pioneering' technology with old sataI i dont know

guess i'll just have to stick to ram-disking until 'rev2'.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 9:28 am

In the meantime, 4gig CF microdrives are going for about the same as that unpopulated card.

teknerd · Post by **teknerd** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 9:59 am

IsaacKuo wrote:In the meantime, 4gig CF microdrives are going for about the same as that unpopulated card.

True, but the speed and latency of a compact flash drive and a RAM drive isnt even comparable.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 10:42 am

I'd rather put the 4gigs of RAM on the motherboard. If the entire file system is essentially cached then the performance will be even better.

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:05 pm

teknerd wrote:
IsaacKuo wrote:In the meantime, 4gig CF microdrives are going for about the same as that unpopulated card.
True, but the speed and latency of a compact flash drive and a RAM drive isnt even comparable.

Don't forget longevity.

mb2: Of course I'd want it $, but £ is more likely...

The important difference between installing 2GB sticks in your motherboard and this is that iRam is a BIOS-recognised drive and it's practically solid-state, whereas ramdisks only work in the OS (so can't run Windows from it) and you have to repopulate them each time. Fine for 24/7 but it isn't that great if you reboot every day.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 12:19 pm

StarfishChris wrote:...whereas ramdisks only work in the OS (so can't run Windows from it)

I don't care, I don't use Windows.

StarfishChris wrote:...but it isn't that great if you reboot every day.

I don't care, I don't use Windows.

But anyway, I just realized there was a misunderstanding--microdrives are honest to goodness hard drives, not flash memory. They're just small enough to fit in the CFII format (.85" rather than 2.5"). Since they're true hard drives, they don't have an inherent overwrite limitation like flash memory.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 4:54 pm

IsaacKuo wrote:
StarfishChris wrote:...whereas ramdisks only work in the OS (so can't run Windows from it)
I don't care, I don't use Windows.

StarfishChris wrote:...but it isn't that great if you reboot every day.
I don't care, I don't use Windows.

So what DO you use? Some OS that magically stays in memory even when the power is off?

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 7:02 pm

Anand got closer than usual but missed the boat on the benefits of this thing. Although the first thought I had about this guy was for a silent workstation, the first practical plan was for an A/V workstation. In such computers, putting in 4GB of system RAM is a no-brainer. 4GB is virtually never enough for A/V apps though, so programs like photoshop would benefit greatly from having an additional 4GB swap drive on top of the 4GB of system RAM. It's a shame they didn't test going this route.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Tue Jul 26, 2005 7:04 pm

Mar. wrote:So what DO you use? Some OS that magically stays in memory even when the power is off?

Hell, yeah! The only OS you need is the BI OS!

I actually use Linux, and the joke was that I don't NEED to reboot the computer every day. Not that I ever needed to reboot my machines regularly when I used Windows.

knutinh · Post by **knutinh** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 12:48 am

disappointing. I was expecting a local "disk controller" that would appear as a disk in windows, but use the full PCI-x bandwidth. As there are PCI/PCI-X disk controllers out there, there should be no theoretical reason why one could not build one with performance many times that of serial ATA as long as the "harddisk" and "controller" is built into the same physical unit?

k

ddrueding1 · Post by **ddrueding1** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 9:46 am

knutinh wrote:disappointing. I was expecting a local "disk controller" that would appear as a disk in windows, but use the full PCI-x bandwidth. As there are PCI/PCI-X disk controllers out there, there should be no theoretical reason why one could not build one with performance many times that of serial ATA as long as the "harddisk" and "controller" is built into the same physical unit?

k

Theres another iRam thread here that goes over why that would be a bad/less usefull idea.

Mar. · Post by **Mar.** » Wed Jul 27, 2005 11:23 am

What the Anandtech benchmarks say to me, is that teir system was not really HDD-bound to the point that the iRAM made a huge difference, and that unless you're looking for absolutely the best perfomance you can possibly get and damn the expense, there's no real reason to get the iRAM.

Anand test the iRAM

Anand test the iRAM

Good with Notebook Drives

silent?

4GB sticks