Using Asus ROG RamDisc

For Reference:
https://rog.asus.com/technology/republic-of-gamers-motherboard-innovations/ramdisk/

I'm using a pretty solid Asus Maximum Hero series ROG motherboard... and I have 24GB of ram installed.

Has anyone used a RamDisc to run SotA? Do you think it would be useful for me and how much of the RAM do you think I should allocate? What folders for SotA should I load into the RamDisc at boot up and which should I not worry about?

 

Bump for being extremely interesting!

 

I did - I don’t remember seeing much if any improvement over my SSD.

Ok I found where I posted about it and I guess there was a slightly noticeable difference back when I tried it

 

Did you only use it experimentally or did you cease using it for a specific reason?

 

The ramdisk story again?
It is not worth it.

 

I tried it last night. There are various utilities out there but the Asus ROG Ram Disk product is pretty automated once set up. I used it before back with SWTOR 3 years ago.

Once set up, when you boot up Windows, the utility already has a drive letter setup and I've told it to load the entire SotA folder into it. Then when you close windows it compares the folder on SSD and the Ramdisk version and refreshes anything that has changed. And each time you open windows it handles copying over SSD to the Ramdisk. I'm impressed with how seamless it is to set up and doesn't seem to take long.

As for the benefit to SotA play. I saw a slightly improvement in load screen. It was the area I was trying to improve. I'm going to run a few more tests this weekend. If it's only saving me less than 3 seconds, I'll probably scrap the use of it.

 

I tried it out for a few days as an experiment - I stopped using it because using the RAM disk was only saving me a second or so on load screens, compared to the SSD.

..now if I was still running a spinning drive -- then totally worth it.

 

That is the impression I get and the thoughts I'm leaning towards.

 

My other thought was that dedicating 10 GB or whatever as a ramdisk just for SOTA wouldn't really be worthwhile - leaving that RAM available for OS disk caching and buffering -- would ultimately serve much the same purpose.

... now I am remembering disk caching back in the DOS days - and how much better the competition was than smartdrv or whatever crap Microsoft provided... I used to run Fast! (I think it was called).

Pretty sure I had the same conclusion back then also and opted for better/faster disk caching than dedicating a ramdisk (running a game like U7 or Wing Commander 2) - except nowadays it's GB's and not MB's

 

There is another ASUS product for ROG level motherboards that is called RamCache. I may try running that as well.

Back in DOS days I used to run a program called Cache86. It was amazing at using the first bit of ram (conventional memory) way better that Microsoft could.

 

Eh... I have given up on using this. I've just decided to improve performance by updating hardware: MoBo/CPU/RAM and improved NVMe SSD.

Going from this:
Asus ROG Maximus Hero VII - z97 MoBo
Intel i5-4590 Haswell (4 cores) 3.3/3.7 GHz
24 gig Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600
Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2gig Overclocked
Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB SATA-3 SSD

To this:
Asus ROG Strix z390-3 Gaming MoBo
Intel i5-9600k Coffee Lake (6 cores) 3.7/4.6 Ghz
32 gig G.SKILL Ripjaws V series DDR4 3600
Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1060 6gig Overclocked
Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB m.2 PCIe NVMe 1.3

Probably overclock it slightly (safely) since I have all the equipment (unlocked CPU, solid case, nice aftermarket CPU fan, heatsinks and spreaders all over MoBo, ram, and SSD).

Some of this will be a work write-off since I work from home. I think the most recent 9th gen Intel CPU (that's only like 5-6 weeks old) and the supporting chipset on the mobo... plus the move from SATA-3 to NVMe SSD should all give a boost... certainly better than a RamDisk or RamCache will.

I certainly don't have any complaints with what I am running now. But I have a buddy that BADLY needs an upgrade. He is running into performance issues with SotA with his older hardware and I can offer him a used hand-me-down friend discount on the stuff I'm pulling out (plus some extra stuff we'll get him). He's running on 8 GB ram and a standard HDD right now. So it'll be a bigger boost for him, than for me.

 

If you're running an M.2 SSD... there's absolutely no point in this, because you are essentially already running a "RAM Disk"...

Now... if you're like me and only have a smaller m.2 (250GB) and a much larger 2TB Firecuda Platter/SSD drive that you install and run all games off of... you might see a bit of a speed boost, if you have enough RAM, that is.

 

I didn't even bother with loading RamDisk despite that this motherboard comes with the new version III.

However, I am overclocking the CPU and RAM since I bought equipment that can run it all.

Kicked the CPU from 3.7GHz/4.7 Turbo to 4.7 Ghz/5.0 Turbo. Even in the heaviest load, CPU temps are in the 60's. And the first two cores are set to run 300 MHz faster than cores 3 to 6. Most of SotA runs on those first two cores from what I am seeing.
Kicked the RAM from 2666 MHz to 3600 MHz. Nice heat spreaders on RAM are keeping it cool.

The ASUS AI software is good at stepping things down too, when not needed. It will drop the clock and voltage down to half spec when the system is in low cpu load to give the cpu some rest. The ROG series boards are so well built and supported.

 

I was running a ramdisk on my Mac Plus with an 800 kilobyte one set up so I could copy the os to it and switch on a single dd/ds 3.5” floppy drive system.

Yes kilobyte. Hehe.

This was before I had a hard drive.

 

Saw this topic on the main index sidebar. Back in the late '80s I had someone install a "Levco MonsterMac" mod in my old 128K. Later I got the Mac Plus ROMs and a SCSI interface board for it. For a while I had 2 megabytes, when almost nobody else had more than 512K, so I used the remainder as a RAMdisk, and even put in a recovery detect so it could stay loaded after a reboot. I also cracked copy protection of a few games so that they could run with MacsBug loaded, and I wouldn't lose my ramdisk. Of course I didn't have time to play most of those games; breaking the copy protection was really the more fun game.

The main problem with using a ramdisk these days is that now we have disk caching, SSDs, and we don't boot off of sub-megabyte floppy drives, so there's less benefit to using them. About the only performance difference between a ramdisk and a very fast SSD with the normal disk cache is that the ramdisk is like forcing certain files to stay in cache permanently.