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Review: GIGABYTE GC-RAMDISK i-RAM

by Steve Kerrison on 27 July 2006, 07:53

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagby

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Introduction


Sometimes it's hard to choose a PC upgrade. Questions arise over which component upgrade is going to provide the greatest benefit. A lot of the time, people plump for a new graphics card, or a CPU. However, probably the best upgrade is RAM. It's easy, not all that expensive (compared to some upgrades) and in most circumstances will make a system run much quicker, reducing load times and increasing application responsiveness.

But upgrading RAM has its limitations. 32-bit systems have a 4GiB ceiling on the amount of memory they can address, and above 3GiB there are some PCI address space issues that can result in you not making good use of all the memory. Even a 64-bit system is limited by the modules it supports and the number of DIMM slots. Beyond those limitations, there's the problem of software. Windows still likes a page file and files still get stored on those woefully slow hard drives we all still use.

i-RAM shot with style, baby

Gigabyte came forth not so long ago with a new solution. It involves using RAM like a hard drive. It's an interesting if somewhat unusual approach to speeding up storage. The product we're talking about, of course, is the i-RAM.