Interesting way to cheat at 4GB RAM barrier...

[cyberjock]

So I've been gnawing on this 32-bit 4GB barrier in Windows XP for a while. I would love to have more than 4GB of RAM in Windows XP. Of course, we know that that's not possible. But I came up with an idea to cheat the system...

I bought a Gigabyte i-Ram card, and put 4GB of RAM on the card. I formatted it for FAT32(apparently it works better for swap file partitions) and I put a 4GB swap file on the i-Ram. Granted the SATA bus speed is only 1.5Gbit/sec, but the fact that the random access times are <0.1ms, I'd say that makes it a very viable alternative. The boot times of the computer are faster, and I can see a marked increase in performance when multitasking and using alot of RAM.

The only other thing I can think of that might make things even faster would be 2 cards on RAID-0.

Anyone else try this and have any additional recommendations or opinions?

If anyone is wondering what an i-RAM is, it's a PCI card that has 4 RAM slots on it. You can put up to 4x1GB sticks on it, and it has a SATA plug for you to plug it into your SATA controller. It uses a PCI slot for power only. All data transfers are via SATA.

Here's a link if you want to look at it:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products...ew.aspx?ProductID=2180&ProductName=GC-RAMDISK

 

[grieve]

Why not just buy a 64bit OS?

**edit**
It is a very interesting idea i would love to see some system benches before and after using the i-ram

 

[kamel5547]

Not a bad idea in itself since windows always wants to use the swap. More memory never quite seems to fix that issue.

Of course you'd be better off with a good SSD since all the files still have to come off the hard drive initially. Considering the pricing once you add in the cost of memory, its actually cheaper per GB to buy an SSD... $119 or so for the card + $40 or so for memory (4x1GB max) is $159 for 4GB, not exactly cost effective.

THe card itself would have to be much cheaper for me to be interested, maybe $40.

 

[husky mctarflash]

Brilliant idea. But sounds too brilliant to be true.

One catch, right off the bat is that it is only 184 pin RAM, ie., DDR RAM, only up to 400 MHz.

I see there are 3 such products on the Gigabyte website--and they were first introduced in 2005. This implies that they haven't taken off in the market. But then again, was there much of a concern for even more than 2 GB RAM back then?

There was a review of it back in the day. The problem is that it is pricey: was $150 in the review. http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312

Did you find it for sale anywhere?

 

[sailer]

I agree with Grieve. Why not just buy a 64 bit OS. Its cheaper, far less hassle, and if anything goes wrong, far easier to diagnose and repair. If you don't want to go with Vista, there's still XP64, which is a very good and stable OS. I've had XP64 for a long time and have yet to have a problem with it.

 

[rodney_ws]

I don't think you're cheating anything by doing that... those iRAM cards were made to put RAM to use as a high speed disk. If someone had 4 GB of DDR and were upgrading to a DDR2/3 rig, I can see being tempted to buy one of those things... everyone else? Nah. Not really.

 

[zenmaster]

Agree, It's not cheating.
A Swap file does not break the Limit in Any Manner.

It makes the use of a Swap File Faster, but that is it.
And a Decent SSD would be just as cheap, almost as fast, and give you more room to do stuff.

 

[Scotteq]

Yah, Zen - My off-the-cuff reaction was "Thumb Drive" when I read this too. Not quite the same here, though, since you have some added bandwidth the system can possibly take better advantage of. Nice idea to set it up as a swap file/drive. Still, it's not like <The OS Which Must NOT Be Named> doesn't have the facility to set this up for you automatically...

 

[rubix_1011]

I am going to go with the majority on this one...64bit OS...add some more DDR2 for your system memory. By the time you get that RAM card, add memory...you are looking at a large chunk of change. 64bit addresses your needs without additional *cludgy* hardware configurations...just add RAM.

 

[cyberjock]

I considered it cheating because I can still use my 32 bit OS with only a modest performance hit, vice using the hard drive swap file. I refuse to "upgrade" to Vista, and the 64bit version of XP just doesn't work very well for alot of applications. In particular applications that I have to use on the system.

I considered the SSD option, however if I used the SSD there would be a few drawbacks:

1. Since I can't afford 2 SSDs, I would want the boot and pagefile to be on the same disk, so the performance of the SSD would be limiting when loading an application(you'd be loading the application at the same time you are paging to disk).
2. SSD has a finite life span. RAM doesn't wear out if I read and write to it forever.
3. SSD are so damn expensive.(an SSD isn't just as cheap zenmaster, although the cost per GB might be)

I was going to attempt to use a thumbdrive, but the performance is just too low when using it over USB. USB isn't very efficient for data transfers.

The DDR isn't actually a limitation. DDR-266 gives transfer rates of 2100 MB/s for single channel. That significantly exceeds SATA speeds of 1.5Gb/sec(or approximately 119MB/sec).

I would do a benchmark, but how do you do a benchmark on the system using pagefile? Sure I can benchmark the system, but with 4GB of RAM already, I'd expect the swapfile to not show a significant performance increase.

 

[Shadow703793]

This would have made sense if you need fast access to large files (ie Video/image editing). Should have just gotten a x64 OS.

See what supremelaw has to say about RAM Disks here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=28&post=250050&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=3&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

 

[grieve]

I refuse to "upgrade" to Vista

Vista is good on a newer machine, if you have 4gigs of ram it’s actually better then XP I think.

Eventually you will join the Vista bandwagon. Now that SP1 is out it is a good time to get your self vista64 Premium or Ultimate

The "Mojave Experiment"
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

 

[jevon]

Not that it's any of my business, but in my opinion it's time most of the people who "refuse" to use Vista to reevaluate the OS and their position. Vista performs very well with a semi-new system and 4gb of memory.

If you're using ancient hardware or outdated software that isn't compatible with a 64-bit OS or Vista, then there's a really good chance something newer and better is out there.

 

[cyberjock]

My system is quite new, 8GB ram, Q6600, 8TB hard drive space on RAID 5... but I refuse to upgrade because every computer I have seen Vista on, including fresh installs, crawled compared to a fully installed XP system.

I've started using Linux because of the problems I've seen and heard in Vista. Yes, I have SEEN as well as heard. I'm not one of those people that just blindly listens to what other people say about it, and just agree. I checked it out for myself. I bought a laptop with it preinstalled, 3GB of ram, and a 10 minute boot time to get to windows on that system is just unacceptable. Windows XP loads with all of the software I have installed on it in 1/2 the time.

I won't be installing Vista on any computer I own. After XP is obsolete, I'll be completely weaned onto Linux.

 

[grieve]

Cyberjock the machine i just sold had a Q6600 with 4gigs of ram and Vista64 Ultimate... It was blazzing fast. Your machine would own Vista and be comparable to XP.

 

[Shadow703793]

^ True.

side note:
Once you switch over and figure out how to use bash, awk,etc on Linux you'll be a 10x more happier than on Windows. Also XP x64 is a possibility. I use it and perfectly stable for me. Your mileage may vary depending on the support for drivers for XP x64.

 

[cyberjock]

It's invalidated because I have personal experience with it and others don't complain? And I was referring to the fresh wipe of the system I performed after getting it home. I always wipe their system after making any restore disks I can(although I have no intention of using them).

I will agree I hate prebuilt, but since I have no option of building laptops, I gotta settle for what I can get.

On a side note, someone who tells me that experience that I've seen with my own eyes is invalidated is asking for a flame war. If you disagree with my opinion that's fine. But when I install Vista with no other software installed and it's 10 minutes before the desktop is displayed, there's a problem. XP handled the same system with lots of software installed in less than 5 mins.

I was just trying to share an idea that I had on how to possibly extend the life of a 32bit OS. There are situations where you do not have an option, or choice, to upgrade to Vista, or to 64bit OS. I am one of those situations. The software I use somewhat runs in Vista, and will not run in 64bit XP. I tried it, but could not keep it stable enough to rely on.

I hadn't seen anywhere someone mentioned using an I-ram for swapfile, so I thought see what people's comments are on it.

 

[grieve]

But when I install Vista with no other software installed and it's 10 minutes before the desktop is displayed, there's a problem.

I agree, there is a problem there...

Vista64Ultimate on my Q6600, 4gigs of ram boot up in about 30-45 seconds. Perhaps you had a bad install or something silly like that.

 

[Scotteq]

My system is quite new, 8GB ram, Q6600, 8TB hard drive space on RAID 5... but I refuse to upgrade because every computer I have seen Vista on, including fresh installs, crawled compared to a fully installed XP system...

I don't care one way or another which OS someone uses, or why. But I *do* have a question:

(1) Usage of this PCi based drive doesn't actually buy you more 'Memory' - It's a swap file on another drive. Faster than a HDD, yes. But it's still an additional drive, rather than usable as memory.

(2) You have 8GB of RAM installed on a 32 bit OS - There is a hard limitation of 4GB for memory mapped I/O, which includes system devices. Your description of your comp leads me to believe you could remove half of your DIMMS and still have the OS not able to use it all because of address space limitations.

So why would you cripple such a nice computer with a 32 bit operating system? Or are you running Server 2003/2008?

 

[halcyon]

TBH (w/out reading all that came before this post), in Vista64 with 8GB of of RAM, you can simply disable the swapfile altogether and have excellent performance. I think there's more utility in that.

 

[cyberjock]

I don't care one way or another which OS someone uses, or why. But I *do* have a question:

(1) Usage of this PCi based drive doesn't actually buy you more 'Memory' - It's a swap file on another drive. Faster than a HDD, yes. But it's still an additional drive, rather than usable as memory.

(2) You have 8GB of RAM installed on a 32 bit OS - There is a hard limitation of 4GB for memory mapped I/O, which includes system devices. Your description of your comp leads me to believe you could remove half of your DIMMS and still have the OS not able to use it all because of address space limitations.

So why would you cripple such a nice computer with a 32 bit operating system? Or are you running Server 2003/2008?

The system I installed Vista on is not the one I mentioned with 8GB of ram. The Vista system has 3GB of RAM. I forget the specs since it has an AMD chip. I've always used Intel with only 3 exceptions, and those 3 exceptions have kept me with Intel(even through Intels bad years).

Just so people understand my background. I am a programmer. I understand exactly why the 4GB RAM limit exists. I also understand how PAE allows a 32 bit OS to allocate more then 4GB of ram.

My 32 bit systems all have no more than 4GB of RAM. This was mentioned as a possible way to cheat and have access to relatively fast transfer rates while having low latency for a swapfile. If you fill your RAM, you have 2 choices, free your RAM, or go to swap file. I chose to attempt to optimize the swap file. If you don't like my idea, then don't use it. But I find it works pretty well, and I wil continue to use it in the future. I was only attempting to offer an effective way to extend the life of 32 bit OSes for people that are locked into using 32 bit OSes, regardless of the reason.

I know alot about how Vista works. Programming in it is a very unique situation compared to XP. I know what I like and don't like about Vista, both as an end user, and as a programmer writing software to use it. I also am fully aware of all of the limitations that MS has deliberately added to limit my use of the system. I do not appreciate being given limitations that serve no purpose, or are commonly disabled by most users.

@ Supremelaw - I very much appreciate your response. I was checking out the Hyperdrive4 also, but the price(even used on Ebay) is very very expensive. I was unable to find any other RAM -> SATA hardware around, so this ACARD is very interesting to me. I will be looking into it. The fact that it uses 2 SATA ports for RAID-0 is awesome. I had thought about how hard that would be to implement on the hardware level. Apparently someone thought of it already.

I was considering using my i-ram as a temp folder like you mentioned, but I found that my system is more responsive using as a swapfile. I guess it just depends on what programs you use and how often you use them.

I spent almost 2 weeks trying to think of all the possible alternatives and which would be the best for my end goal(increase the performance of the swap file and/or temp file). Unfortunately I could find no other hardware and price combination that worked better than this.