Gigabyte I-Ram, finally here

[EODetroit]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815168001

So who is going to buy it and see if WoW load times are improved for me?

 

[cirrhosis]

I was planning on buying it in a few weeks with 4 1GB Kingston modules. Though I certainly won't be using it for WoW.

 

[GrammatonJP]

I order 2 last week from NW, coming tomorrow.

 

[HO]

I think this will be a better implementation. It can accomodate 8GB of RAM and uses the PCIe bus: DDR Drive

 

[cirrhosis]

512 unit inital production? Looks fantastic otherwise. If it's for DDR1 then I'm sold, as long as it comes out this Q.

 

[SpeedZealot369]

what is this?

 

[goobernoodles]

Simply put, you add ram to it and use it as a very fast hard drive.

 

[SpeedZealot369]

What do you mean add ram? and how does a fast hard drive(especially this small) help?

 

[batmanuel]

Can't wait until they get the DDR2 version out, since that stuff is pretty soon going to be the best deal for large capacity sticks once they ramp up production on the DDR2 for the AM2 Athlons. OTOH, once AM2 hits the streets, a person with this model could probably raid FS/FT for good deals on 1GB DDR sticks.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: SpeedZealot369
What do you mean add ram? and how does a fast hard drive(especially this small) help?

This comes as just the card only. You then have to buy sticks of DDR RAM to put into it, or recycle some of your older, slower RAM (I'm hoping Fry's will have some bundle deals on the i-RAM + memory). Since the RAM is able to transfer data WAY fast than a hard drive, you get really good performance on operations that are bound by hard drive speed. It'd be great for a small partition where you could install your current favorite game for super fast level load times. It might also be useful as a Photoshop or system swap file, but then again if you're hitting the swap file in either case your best bet might be to max out your system RAM (or move to a 64-bit OS that allows your individual apps to access more RAM).

 

[GrammatonJP]

looks better but not having battery backup is a big mistake... they'll probably fix that..

unless they want you to supply the ups to it.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
looks better but not having battery backup is a big mistake... they'll probably fix that..

unless they want you to supply the ups to it.

Did you miss the big square battery-shaped thing on the end of the board? It's a 1600 mAh backup battery.

 

[biostud]

it needs SATA-II interface

 

[mazeroth]

Soooooo dumb.

 

[HO]

Originally posted by: mazeroth
Soooooo dumb.

Really? I'd say it depends. I would love to try one out as a Scratch disk for Photoshop. As a boot drive, no thanks.

 

[Corporate Thug]

Originally posted by: mazeroth
Soooooo dumb.

why?

 

[essasin]

cool but expensive

 

[alimoalem]

i'll consider it when you can put 16+gigs on it and ram is $15-20 per gig

 

[StrangerGuy]

Expensive, but I think it will good for those peeps with spare DDR they can't use in their PCs.

 

[Continuity28]

Unfortunately, even with 2GB of system memory, some of the programs I use demand more, some of which also have memory leaks.. which makes me need virtual memory on a hard drive. With this, I can throw in my old DDR memory and have a 2GB hard drive for purely pagefile usage. I'm happy it's finally released.

/buys

 

[SpeedZealot369]

What would this thing be ideal for?

 

[twitchee2]

2 of these with 8gb of ram in raid 0....that would be freaking fast but no where near worth the price what so ever.

 

[SpeedZealot369]

Oh so it's like your using the actual memory as storage?

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: twitchee2
2 of these with 8gb of ram in raid 0....that would be freaking fast but no where near worth the price what so ever.

Would RAID-0 even benefit you with this card? I'd figure that the SATA 150 bus would be saturated by a single iRAM card.

EDIT: Already went up $5!

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: batmanuel
Would RAID-0 even benefit you with this card? I'd figure that the SATA 150 bus would be saturated by a single iRAM card.

SATA bandwidth is per port, so the bottleneck would be elsewhere, likely the CPU or the user.

Why can't they just prototype one in it's own drive bay like a real drive? Then you could at least have room for 12 sticks of RAM.