WoW Folder in Ram basic 64G System $1600 WOOT

[Sam DeathWalker]

As you know I have been pushing putting the wow folder in system ram for some time now (ramdisk).

Well seems that the dream will soon be reality.

Prices is down big time.

No SSD needed!



64G ram $600

http://www.provantage.com/corsair-cm...0~7CSMC0KC.htm

$339 MB

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...7BBTkwCjCECjCE

CPU $600

http://www.provantage.com/intel-bx80...k~7ITEP3K9.htm


Not sure if this is all actually available but we have prices and listed items. They say "special order" so supplies might be tight but 2-3 months from now we should be roxoring!


About $1600 for the "no texture lag wow in ram" system basics.

WooT!

[Oatboat]

What about rebooting!?

What about power failures!?!

What about what about what about!

I wonder how fast it would actually be.

[JackBurton]

Thats going to be a beast. So you need more than 32 gigs? how much does win7 + wow need to run like this. Got the link to the guide?

[jstanthr]

IMO i would go with one of the WS or Revolution Asus or Gigabyte boards, that is a good board, but i know that you would have better stability and performance out of the ws or revo boards. I can post benchmarks for all that i have tested so far if you guys would like since the NDA is now lifted.

[moosejaw]

That will be an excellent machine. Imagine a dual processor i7-39xxK instead of the single cpu board listed. You could run most of your team on one machine.

I am hoping this new hardware and hard drive pricing drop together in ~ 6 months. Would make for a crazy "Summer of Sam".

[Ughmahedhurtz]

What about rebooting!?

What about power failures!?!

What about what about what about!

I wonder how fast it would actually be.

If you run ISBoxer, I think you can point your character profile to any folder on the hard drive you want, which would save your data in case something catastrophic happened.

[Sam DeathWalker]

You might only need to put the read only folder "data" into ram. 27.7 gig on my computer. Now if you can figure out which is which for which zones or parts fo the world you are in you can work it that way also and maybe, just maybe get by with 32gigs. Well you might be able to do 32 gigs with just 5 or so instances and the data folder .... still that leaves no head room for expansion and $600 is not a lot to blow on ram compared to what we see people spending for top flight systems here.

That way if you do get a power failure you lose nothing.

Ya you have to read the full 27.7 gig into ram each time before you start wow but then all your accounts can use it.

Isnt the sabertooth supposed to be the most stable of all the boards with all these mil spec caps and what not?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Keep in mind an upcoming patch is supposed to do a bunch of data consolidation, which should dramatically reduce the overall size of the data files.

[daviddoran]

You could set up a batch file to copy the data folder to the ram disk at startup, so rebooting shouldn't be an issue.

[Sajuuk]

I already did this. I didn't really test it, since I don't feel like playing wow. But in other games the advantages over my SSD are slight, but noticeable. I don't have an optimal system in place to make loading ramdisk images (Bulk storage is a usb2 external).

Regarding loading the game into RAM each time you load it: Again, depends on the drives you're loading from. Moving 30GB isn't done instantly without an array of some sort, or thinking ahead with scripts to load images or copy/synch folders.

Testing could be done to test performance, but I feel I would be very limited by graphics, since I'm using Sandy Bridge integrated due to a strange performance issue. - If I use an addon card my sound "stutters" when I move my mouse, and the system is slower in general. Unfortunate, but for the games I play integrated actually works quite well.

Also, when I did load games into a ramdisk, Load screens were faster, yes, but I still had them. I don't believe games are being made in such a way that could really take advantage of the high data transfer rates of a ramdisk. There's also managing the games you load into ram. A hassle, really.

So, to state:
1: Performance is great, but for our planned application (loading games into ram on demand, and synching/backing up/reloading), we would need a speedy disc array to back it up, and at that point, performance gains are marginal. Other system components may hinder performance. No money or will to test.
2. The games aren't optimized for it. We load the majority of data in bulk in loading screens, for most games. We would need to load game resources frequently and transparently to take advantage of it. But still, load screens.

It's okay, but not the bee's knees. Also, if you watch on newegg you could get 16gb (2x8gb) kits for 100 dollars.

You could have similar performance, less cost, and more flexibility making an SSD array, two high grade ssds can be had for roughly the same amount of funds.