For emphasis...it ain't that expensive.

^^^^^RAM spam^^^^^^

RND...I could max out my MoBo with that for under 120 ...... [mine's 6 banks of max 4]...

...but then I'd have 12 that I couldn't use - no other machine it'd suit...

Just checked...6x4 sticks of DDR3 would be $150 ....where I get my stuff....

Since we're kind of rambling...

Any of you guys that are RAM-flush ever set up a RAM drive with it?  I've always wondered if it was really worth the effort.

Well good for you, over here I'm looking at prices of almost 40 GBP for in an inferior model. or more like 80 GBP for the same thing.

Of course I suppose I could find a supplier that ships internationally and has a competitive price, but I think it would be a waste of money.

Ram drives are nice but situational.

Setting one up requires specific software for the task, and increases boot times.

If you play a particular, load intensive game, on a regular basis, it makes perfect sense.  It also makes more sense if your computer is always on.  I don't and I shut it down at night, so I've never gotten around to it despite having 32GB to play with.

If you're bottle necked by the drive and regularly use a particular program with heavy loading times, go for it.  The software is cheap, the gains are utterly massive over a disk drive.  Still massive over a fast SSD, but more like 10x than 50x.

There's also one area where the proper software would be... fantastic.

If you're one of those stupid schmucks that bought a 32-bit operating system because your brain didn't finish developing, you can use it to create a page file disk using extra ram your gimped piece of shit operating system can't access...  Once you've got your just as fast as regular memory page file, 32-bit piece of shit operating system isn't so shit anymore.  You have to be particular in software selection, RamDisk Plus is the only one I'm sure works this way.

I've got a few games I really like that get their panties in a twist over not having a page file, and paging a drive is a terrible thing to do to yourself, and the drive.  I might actually do it one of these days just to end that crap.

Thanks psychoak, that's a nice summary.  Anytime I've googled it I've been left wondering.  The only other thing I've seen that it might be helpful with is pointing temp files over to it, but those are often so small anyway other than s/w installs.  It did make sense to me that people would use them for temps on SSD's to cut down the usage.

I was just saying that DDR3 ram ain't that high. It's the older stuff that gets expensive.