Gigabyte i-RAM (OcUK has it in stock)

[nikebee]

a heads up for those who want the fastest stuff around...

OcUK have got Gigabyte's i-RAM in stock, a hefty pricetag for something that on its own... does nothing, since you'd need to get some ram for it (max of 4GB too)... still would be nice for a windows install at least.

might get one in a few weeks (and thats a big might) and then get some OcUK value ram for it to run off too... i don't imagine tight timings will have any difference on these things

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_SATA_RAID_424.html#ahd_2d000_2dgi

 

[nikebee]

Gigabyte i-RAM 2 will be here shortly, and next year you will problay see flash hard drives in laptops so its not worth the money

Gigabyte i-RAM 2 will be DDR2 + sata2 3Gb/s and will take upto 8gb and 16gb
of memory.

thats just rumors about i-RAM 2 as far as i know, nothing confirmed as of yet...
just googled it too, can only find ONE website with info about it on, all the others talk about this website or link to it. :-/

 

[nikebee]

£176.19

That can't be right the whole idea of the card was it was going to be cheap
and sold worldwide for less than $150.

In the USA they are about $115 wich is about £62

?

all UK PC mags have expected prices to be high... which is ridiculous considering US pricing as you said...
your looking at £300+ just for the controller card and 4GB of ram/storage

edit: just reading one of the AnandTech reviews (with the links to where to buy) and one has it for as little as $79.99


might purchase one, get it sent to my brother (lives in denver) and ask him to ship it over

 

[nikebee]

Don't see how RAID would benefit a solid-state drive myself, then again, it's a bit early in the morning so maybe I'm missing something

i'd imagine RAID would have benefits not really fot speed, but more for protection (having a second i-RAM drive to back up the original for example).

 

[nikebee]

can you use any 1 gig ram modules with this i-RAM?

would it be best to go with some low latency ram, or does it not make a difference? if not might get some gail value ram and try one.

its reported that certain brands dont work 100% well with it (this months CustomPC) but it doesn't say what... whilst other mags (PC Format) don't mention anything.

personally when i get mine from the states i'm gonna be chucking either some GeIL Value Ram or some of the OcUK rebadged stuff in it.

 

[nikebee]

In the case of my old Atari, with its HDs already being slow anyway, using a CF Card as a HD isnt a speed issue.

With PCs however, I have tried it in a PC, and for DOS / Win3.11 its fine... Hell its useable for Win95 too, but I have used a 2MB card from my mate, to install XP on, and its bloody attrocious.

Tech is improving every few seconds though, and its only time before we will all be using them, and saying things like "Do you remember when we were stuck with using SataII?" and "How did we do it? Its so slow" Just like many of us remember using 8 inch floppies and tapes... Its only around the corner.

was there a time when the internet wasn't around too...
how did you talk to people.... no... wait... how did you go onto OcUK forums

 

[nikebee]

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/cgi-b...ek_Only_25.html#aHD_2d000_2dGI#aHD_2d000_2dGI
this week only for £117.44 inc VAT.

still a big amount compared to getting it from the US though

 

[nikebee]

Doesnt an XP install take up more than 4gb after formatting anyway?

Plus, you cant leave your pc off without power for more than 24 hours otherwise itll lose the install

most PSU's these days still draw power and supply power to the mobo as long as they're plugged into the socket (hence why some optical mice still stay powered up dispite the pc being turned off.)
the only way your going to lose data on these is if you have a SERIOUS powercut that lasts about 20 hours... and lets be honest, that rarely ever happens (infact the longest i remember is about 12ish).

What are you complaining about? This is always the way, if you want the latest high-performance device, you have to pay a premium.

i'm not sure if thats aimed at me, or athe guy who made the comment about having to sell everything he owns to do with his pc to afford it.
personally, i'm only complaining about UK pricing. yes this is brand new stuff, yes its high end, high performance hardware we're dealing with. and yes, there has always been a divide betwee UK/US pricing... but when your talking about us paying over double the US price... its a little ridiculous.
an american competitor has these for $80 on release (of course not including shipping), whilst OcUK sold them for almost £180 on release.

again, this isn't really a dig at OcUK - more of the annoying price of hardware/goods in the UK compared with elsewhere.

 

[nikebee]

What's the point in a DDR2 version? The iRAM is limited by being connected to the PCI bus which has 133Mb/sec max bandwidth. The iRAM will be fighting with other PCI devices for access to the bus. HDD controllers were moved off the main PCI bus in around 1999 (Intel Hub architecture on the i800 series) to free up PCI bandwidth.

An iRAM that uses PCI express is a different matter. As is SATAII because then there might be a device that can actually used the available bandwidth!

no they aren't mate, they're only using the PCI slots to draw power, they transfer over a SATA connection...

 

[nikebee]

Thanks for pointing that out ... AGAIN.

jees calm down mate, i just didn't notice that anybody had said it...
i scanned down and didn't notice pyro's reply (or your quote for that matter).

no need to break out the caps and the rollyeyes :-/

Having had a quick fiddle with my new toy (... the iRAM), I can probably sum up my findings by The Good, The Bad and The Indifferent.
The Good - It does indeed bench as suggested in various reviews and saturates my ICH5R SATA at ~ 138MB/s. Access time 0.0 - 0.2ms
The card is well constructed and does its job.
The Bad - A few points I hadn't considered: Firstly this is one massive card and will require some re-working of my tidy case / watercooling. It really is a beast. Secondly, using SATA is something of a pain, as it meant moving my storage HDD onto the awful and slow Promise378 SATA on my MSI MoBo. Both complaints are due to my lack of planning.
The Indifferent- Bench's are great, but what of real world performance / human (first) impressions... Booting Windows and loading applications just isn't significantly faster than a 10k Drive (Raptor 36GB) to justify the price. So I would say most users would feel indifferent or disappointed. However, for my research work (which probably has similar access requirements as large databases / webservers?), this really has speeded things up. Times were reduced from say 400s to 300s for each simulation. Not an earth-shattering speed-up, but when you need to run several thousand simulations...

In Conclusion:
* Nice, well built product- although beware the size of the card.
* It provides a reasonable advantage to very specific applications and Users.
* But for the general user, a 10k SATA drive would make more sense.
* If they start pricing these things <£50, it does make for a fun toy

PS- Will post a full review with photos as time allows and when I've tracked down some more RAM...

cheers for the review mate, from what i have seen windows was blisteringly fast after being installed onto the iRAM drives
what else did you install onto it to test it out, wouldn't mind seeing some of your opinions on game loadings etc...

 

[nikebee]

@nikebee
Currently I'm looking at a minor mod to the iRAM, so until that's finished I can't test it further. I installed WinXP (vanilla) to the iRAM and found that compared to my Raptor with an nlite'd WinXP, the boot time was not noticeably faster. The same for loading OpenOffice (which is slow to load and hits the HDD). However, for that testing my machine was at stock speed- maybe the CPU was the bottleneck?... I might re-test when my machine is overclocked again.
Looking at numbers the iRAM will always have better load times, but in terms of perceptual difference I think most Users might struggle to justify the cost. However as I said, for a specific activity which is disk intensive, then the iRAM (clearly) excels.

@earlyflash
Sorry. To clarify those times are for the highest resolution models, of which only a few are done (10-100). However, in total it is likely this speed-up will save me a few weeks of processing. Currently I only have 2GB on loan, if I can get hold of 4GB it's likely that more complex models will be run. So in fact any time savings will be negated... but more accurate data produced.

Cheers,
Andrew

hmmm... can't wait to get some spare cash together to get one now...
may i ask what mod your doing to the iRAM?