Have at me

[zaph0d]

Ok so the specs are in my profile but anyway

Cpu: Xeon X5650 2.66GHz Hex Core @ 4.2GHz with Speedstep Enabled and max load Vcore of 1.32v
Ram: 6X 4GB of Komputerbay 2000MHz 10-11-10-28 running at 1600 8-9-9-20
HDD: 2X Samsung Spinpoint F1 750GB HD753LJ's in Raid0
GPU: Sapphire HD7970
Case: Lian Li PC-343B (Original Model)
Sound: Usually Logitech PC960 Usb Headset
Display: LG 37" 1080P LED 3D DVB-S2
Optical: Lite-On iHBS112 BR-RW
Keyboard: Logitech G510S
Mouse: Logitech MX500 - Over 10 years old and still rockin' - tried the G5-Laser and went back to the trusty MX
Cooling: Custom loop with Swiftech Pump, Waterblocks on Cpu & Gpu 240mm Passive Rad on top of case, 360mm Active Rad at front of case, Dual Bay Reservoir, 1/2"ID Pipe

Games are installed onto seperate Ramdrives that are saved as image files to allow for quick loading, this even works with Steam Games. This provides for better game performance than any SSD available on the market.

For folks looking to get maximum Bang/Buck upgrade the Socket 1366 Xeon's will work on any Asus X58 (and presumably others) with the latest Bios and are currently seriously cheap - can be had for under £90 off ebay by the thousand - due no doubt to upgrades in server farms recently, m/boards are also cheap due to age - hey the Socket came out in '08. These chips are slightly lower voltage than the i7 970/980X so are cooler running and slightly better overclockers in general.
You could get the pair of them for the price of an i7 Haswell Quad-Core... and get a Hex-Core that can do 4.2GHz-ish below Intel spec max voltage, more if you're prepared to up it to 1.45 or so - had mine at 4.63GHz at that myself, still with Speedstep enabled but HyperThreading off.

Pic O Inside
http://s23.postimg.org/g1h1oy2zf/P1000193.png

Questions Queries Have At Me

[narz]

I'll have at ya - I'm interested in how the Ramdrive and loading games from images work..

tells me more me ol' skippa, who/what/where/when/why/links etccc

[zaph0d]

Who, doesn't matter, What is ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver, Where is on the internet, When is whenever you get it, Why is because it's free and far faster than SSD, links is http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

Ok here's the quick rundown, once installed you can use Imdisk to create a ramdrive in either virtual or physical ram, always take the physical option - if you think you might not have enough ram you don't have enough ram.
The drive is assigned a drive letter of your choice (I always pick R) and you are prompted to format it, once formatted goto the drive's properties and enable compression - cost's zero performance, saves space on the image.

Here's the fun part - it's best to install your games to your normal location as usual ie c:\games\<whatever>\ or c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\<whatever>\. Once done you'll have an idea of how big a ramdrive you'll need as a maximum so create accordingly. Once done, formatted, and compression enabled copy the files "Without Parent Directory ie the <whatever>" into the ramdrive. At some point during the copy you'll be informed that it's outta space - this is normal and if you give it a few seconds it goes away.
After this if you're happy with the size of the image save it somewhere. If the compression has saved a huge amount of space you can re-create the drive smaller and copy the files in bunches to allow the compression to do it's thing which will usuall save you a couple gig on games that are 12G+.
From here it get's a little more complicated - you have to delete everything in the source folder ie the <whatever> folder wherever it is but not the <whatever> folder itself and load the image in such a way that it takes the place of that folder instead - this is done via a .Bat file, for eg "imdisk -a -t vm -f C:\GameImages\FavGame.img -m C:\Games\<whatever>" to unmount the image later so you can switch to another you need another command "imdisk -d -m C:\Games\<whatever>"
Now when it's loading the image it'll take a little time, depending on the size of the image and the speed of you drive(s) you'll probably get between 6 and 12 gig a minute with most standard drives, that's between 100 & 200MB/s and it will load at these sorts of speeds because it's just reading one big file as opposed to lots of little ones like in most games.

ImDisk has it's own little forum at http://reboot.pro/forum/59-imdisk/ and there's a nice FAQ & How-To's thread there.

I've been using this for a couple years now and you wouldn't believe the difference it makes, it won't speed up your boot time any like an SSD will but you can shove as many games in there as you big mechanical drives can handle and you get speed that's better than SSD once the image is loaded so all in-game loads are basically proccessor limited.
I've tested it against a pair of Sata-II Raid0 SSD's and found it's load times between areas on Final Fantasy XIV (1.x) to be maginally faster (couple of seconds or so) and when lot's of chars where on screen such as when in town the framerate did not dip while loading all the individual armour textures wheras I still lost a few fps on the SSD's usually down to about 20-22fps (I ran with a 30fps cap so it would've been more severe a drop at 60 / uncapped)
So it's useful not just for faster load times but also smoother gameplay in general when lots of small file accesses are done. Then as mentioned before there's the fact that saving the images onto a standard mechanical drive means more free space and less wear on your booting SSD.

Think that's about it really.

Any queries questions and quantities, you know where to find me... as for the quantities a Pint of Strongbow'll do just fine

[zaph0d]

Plus, I just took a gander at your spec as listed in profile - you're an excellent candidate for the Xeon and X58 upgrade. Including 24Gig of ddr3 (3X8GB) you could upgrade for at most £300. £90 for the chip, £100 for the ram and whatever you can get a mobo for cheaper is better and a HSF or Waterblock if you're already liquid.

[kalniel]

A ramdisk won't be any faster than having the data in Windows ram cache though, will it?

[zaph0d]

Technically in terms of read/write speed no, but you have no control over what goes into/out of the windows cache - it also cache's on the fly so it wouldn't even attempt to cache a game before you start loading and once you've started loading it's no good, as to copy to cache would mean it'd have to basically pause the program loading, cache everything, then resume from there.
It would also read all the files in standard format so lots of small files would mean a low read speed, with mechanical drives that generally means single digit MB/s.
The Big advantages of the ramdrive is one part control in that you tell it "Load all this data" and one part speed in that because an image is a large single file it is able to read it as such into ram at max speed the drive is physically capable of.
In fact assuming you've got the 6 ram slots on your board I'd recommend grabbing 3 8GB sticks and having 36GB. Ignore the fact that your manual states 24GB max... it's not it's just that 8GB sticks didn't exist in '08 and weren't forseen as happening except possible expensive slow ecc server sticks.

[narz]

Thanks for the info on ImDisk sounds very interesting and will be sure to give it a try once I upgrade (to something).

Plus, I just took a gander at your spec as listed in profile - you're an excellent candidate for the Xeon and X58 upgrade. Including 24Gig of ddr3 (3X8GB) you could upgrade for at most £300. £90 for the chip, £100 for the ram and whatever you can get a mobo for cheaper is better and a HSF or Waterblock if you're already liquid.

ok i'm all down for saving money so if you see my provisional bits I selected in this thread -> here

You can see for an extra £140-£180, ontop of your £300 I can be running a newer board, new Xeon E3 1230/i5 3690 albeit with less ram.

So I guess your build is probably aimed more at overclockers?

[zaph0d]

Well it's more aimed at those who want high power gaming but either unable or unwilling to spend over £500 on high end mobo/cpu/memory combo's.
As long as you're prepared to oc the Xeon X5650 a bit (and it's real easy to oc just by turning up the ol' bus speed from 133 to 180 or 200 and leaving everything else stock standard and ending up with a 3.6 or 4.0 Hex Core. The chip in question while pretty old physically it's not that far different from the Sandy-Ex or Ivy-Ex chips. It's got 3 memory channels, 40 PCIeV2 (it's enough for triple whatever graphics cards believe me).
Only downside is that both the chip and mobo would be 2nd hand off ebay, but you won't find any other intel Hex cores available for under £200 2nd hand and not under £400 new... and in both cases before a mobo or ram.
As it's a Xeon it's a top bin chip - they come off the line with the lowes voltages as they're expected to be in high heat cases so .02v less can make a difference and .12v a huge difference. Works the other way too, up the voltage a little within intel spec and you've got a real firecracker.

The build you've got there is pretty good but if it's going to be used for gaming the i5's 3.5GHz is better than the Xeon's 3.3GHz. Games are moving into better threaded territory but for the next couple years clockspeed is still king and more threads are better but only provided you've got enought physical cores to feed 'em to.
Hyperthreading is mostly Hyperbole, it's better for only a few select worktypes and games don't do most of those and the few times they do they don't do it enough to benefit from the extra threading.
Also overclocking ain't just about getting more power right now, (bragging rights aside) it's more about extending the lifespan of your chosen product to allow you to either put off upgrading a bit longer when a massive tech change is expected (like the Haswell-E with DDR4 due in Q3) and you want to buy it when the price has fallen from the initial buy-surge, or when you simply are unable to afford better hardware and need to extend the life of your chosen hardware.
This is why I've got the X5650 myself, I was using an i7-920 and it was starting to feel a bit sluggish and it was already running at 3.8GHz from 2.66GHz and had no room left, I couldn't afford a complete overhaul of Cpu & Mobo to an SB-E or IB-E but then spotted the Xeon, 50% more cores, newer process meaning lower voltage and higher speed and works on current mobo & Ram. Cost me £90 and my system is minimum 12% faster just on raw clockspeed, and over 60% faster in terms of total processing power.

So yeah the build I'd recommend requires overclocking and 2nd hand parts but you'll have a much more powerful system and nearly £200 you could put towards a good gfx card

[zaph0d]

Just noticed also in your thread you do a lot of photoshop, if you run the Xeon X5650 @ 4GHz it'll rip the E3 up and eat it for brekkie, 6 cores 12 threads 3 memory channels and 12Meg cache.

[narz]

Cheers for the info zaph00000d its given me alot of food for thought

[zaph0d]

NP, hope it helps in one way or another - either the Ramdrive, the Hardware or Both.

[narz]

Just for kicks I thought I'd spec up and price it for comparison

CPU
Xeon X5650 Ebay link - £89

Motherboard
MSX X58 - MS-7593 -> Ebay link £70~?

Memory
12GB Corsair Memory XMS3 DDR3 (triple channel) ->Scan link - £95


Brings it to £254 without a water cooling kit and suitable mid tower case. which will likely bring it closer to £350ish I think. (£100 less than my intended 3690 plan)

not too bad I guess, if it hits 4.0ghz.

[zaph0d]

It will - without any problems. It should hit 4.2GHz within intel spec voltage with speedstep enabled to allow for lower voltages at lower clockspeeds, and even higher at fixed voltage, as mentioned before mine hit 4.63GHz at 1.45v still with speedstep enabled, it'd probably've hit 4.7 maybe 4.8 with 1.45 solid.
Disabling the Hyperthreading allows for lower voltage, higher clock and lower heat. With 6 real cores do you need anothe 6 virtual cores?

Also
Memory
24GB Komputerbay Memory DDR3 Triple Channel 8GB X 3 Amazon link

[jim]

Given that games aren't particularly I/O bound, not when it comes to framerates at least, what's your thinking with the RAM drive? I mean, sure, it'll be faster, but it sounds like a lot of effort as well when compared to just running everything off an SSD in the first place. Is the benefit worth the effort, in your experience?

[zaph0d]

Actually yes - the effort once you get into the swing of it is minimal. The first few times you set one up you'll be checking and double checking to make sure it's all right, after that you've got the process down and might even be enabling ntfs comp in the HD install to get an idea of the compressed size before dumping to ramdrive to allow for better adjustment.
As to the benefits in games - when it comes to framerates the only time they'll improve is when there's lots of small files being read on the fly - basically large-world games with on-the-fly loading, Skyrim etc - and MMO games, especially the MMORPG's when you're in towns and the's dozens or even hundreds of chars on screen.
The biggest advantages of ramdrive over SSD is cost/space utilization, you can save/load an image to/from a big mechanical drive almost as fast as an SSD would but you can have a heck of a lot more of them on a £70 2TB drive than would fit on a £60 128GB drive, also as mentioned before an ntfs-compressed ramdrive performs marginally faster than an uncompressed one (weird but true), and takes up less physical hard drive space than the game would normally and allowing it to be read into Ram image quicker, a 1Gig compression saves 5-10s image load time.
The other main advantages are, in-game load times and smoothness. This simply due to the ability to read in excess of 7GB/sec allows for level/area laod times to be reduced appreciably, often to the point that the load screen has barely faded in before it's faded out. So even though it'll take a min to load the image in the first place you'll more than make that time back.

[Agent]

I've used RAM drives for a while too. It's a bit of an old habit from when I was an RISC OS user. Some things have a huge increase from using them - some DISM operations can go from several minutes to a few seconds due to the huge amount of random I/O read and writing they do. The increase is almost unbelievable. I've actually got a post semi-written up in Word that I need to finish and post about RAM drives and Windows images....it's one for another day

I've done it with games too, but the difference is minimal in my experience, certainly from a SSD. In fact that last round of tests I did showed almost no difference with a stopwatch (yes, I'm sad) when I was testing a few games, so I tend not to bother with games.