Are RoG RAM Cache and RAM Disk worth running?

[neiljwd]

I only game and internet.

I'm guessing the community has judged them with far more expertise than I'll ever have, are they recommended? Any particular setting?
Gene VIII+6700k, 16gb RAM, RAM 950 ssd, gtx970.

[Korth]

Processor cache (on-die volatile SRAM) can access data virtually instantaneously.
DDR4 (volatile SDRAM) can access data in a few nanoseconds.
Firmware and fast SSD/NVMe/PCIe storage (flash NVRAM) can access data in a dozen nanoseconds.
Slow SSD and USB storage (flash NVRAM) can access data in a few dozen milliseconds.
HDD storage (fast magnetic media) can access data in a dozen milliseconds.
Floppy and tape storage (slow magnetic media) can access data in a few dozen milliseconds.
CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray ODD storage (optical media) can access data in a hundred milliseconds.

There is nothing faster in practice than a RAM disk for raw performance.
But there is also nothing more expensive in practice than using RAM for raw data storage, and empty RAM is an expensive waste. At least empty drives (SSD, HDD, USB, etc) can always be filled up later.

Win7/8/10 OS technically requires only 2GB-4GB of main RAM, although it'll happily bloat out to 8GB when able. So 8GB is plenty.
Web browsers are trivial applications, although multiple instances filled with "heavy" data streams (like multiple pages of youtube and facebook videos) can gobble up memory. But 8GB is still plenty.
A few game titles already require 16GB for best performance. The vast majority of games do not require (and won't even use) more than 8GB. Your gaming performance will primarily be defined by your GPU card.

You might be able to speed up some games by carefully selecting exactly how much of exactly what stuff gets put onto a RAM disk, but it would be a bit of a hassle (because it locks out RAM from other applications) and it wouldn't provide much of a real performance gain over your very fast Samsung 950 SSD device.
I think you'd be better off without ROG RAMDisk on your 16GB system, it's much more useful on 32GB+ systems.

[Wollah]

Korth wrote:
Processor cache (on-die volatile SRAM) can access data virtually instantaneously.
DDR4 (volatile SDRAM) can access data in a few nanoseconds.
Firmware and fast SSD/NVMe/PCIe storage (flash NVRAM) can access data in a dozen nanoseconds.
Slow SSD and USB storage (flash NVRAM) can access data in a few dozen milliseconds.
HDD storage (fast magnetic media) can access data in a dozen milliseconds.
Floppy and tape storage (slow magnetic media) can access data in a few dozen milliseconds.
CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray ODD storage (optical media) can access data in a hundred milliseconds.

There is nothing faster in practice than a RAM disk for raw performance.
But there is also nothing more expensive in practice than using RAM for raw data storage, and empty RAM is an expensive waste. At least empty drives (SSD, HDD, USB, etc) can always be filled up later.

Win7/8/10 OS technically requires only 2GB-4GB of main RAM, although it'll happily bloat out to 8GB when able. So 8GB is plenty.
Web browsers are trivial applications, although multiple instances filled with "heavy" data streams (like multiple pages of youtube and facebook videos) can gobble up memory. But 8GB is still plenty.
A few game titles already require 16GB for best performance. The vast majority of games do not require (and won't even use) more than 8GB. Your gaming performance will primarily be defined by your GPU card.

You might be able to speed up some games by carefully selecting exactly how much of exactly what stuff gets put onto a RAM disk, but it would be a bit of a hassle (because it locks out RAM from other applications) and it wouldn't provide much of a real performance gain over your very fast Samsung 950 SSD device.
I think you'd be better off without ROG RAMDisk on your 16GB system, it's much more useful on 32GB+ systems.

So does this still do any good if I already use intel optane 32GB??? I mean if I already have 32gb optane, will RAMCACHE II still benefit or maybe slow down?

[Korth]

Wollah wrote:
So does this still do any good if I already use intel optane 32GB??? I mean if I already have 32gb optane, will RAMCACHE II still benefit or maybe slow down?

I don't know but I don't expect RAMCache will give any real performance gains on an Optane cache drive.

I've only bought a couple Optane drives, and only for a niche use where they provide a specific advantage over fast SSD.
In a non-ASUS platform. I can't test RAMCache on it.

But you can test it easily enough by comparing benchmarked and real performances, with RAMCache, without RAMCache.
Results will depend a lot on what you actually do with your computer ... and will likely vary from how much (and how fast) physical RAM is installed in it. If you find the difference isn't noticeable or significant then it's probably better to just discard the RAMCache option, but you'll never know what impact RAMCache might have until you try it. Few ROG enthusiasts buy into Optane from what I've seen.

[Padlorr]

I'm a performance enthusiast, so sad to say I've been running Ram Cache III since I built my new Windows 10 Pro rig with Rog Strix x570-e gaming, 5600X, 32 GB G.Skill Flare X 14 cas 3200mhz RAM, Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB M2/NVME, PowerColor RX 580 Red Devil Golden, and no overclocking whatsoever, and I've had consistent issues cropping up every day or two where the Samsung Pro 980 ssd and or Toshiba 4 TB HDD get corrupted or dism or sfc /scanow find and (usually) fix Windows file system corruption. When I disable Ram Cache III the corruption magically stops happening. When I turn it back on, voila, Windows presents a pop that says Windows needs to restart to fix drive corruption, or when booting it just automatically goes into chkdsk scan/fix routine. This little software utility is dangerous and the risk of data corruption, in my experience, is 100% (which is more than extremely high).

[Qwinn]

If you've got 32gigs of RAM, yeah, it's worth reserving 2 gigs for a volatile RAM disk to put all your browser cache files on. Not just for the speed, tho that is nice. But the primary and secondary purposes are: 1) that your cache has now become self-cleaning, and will be purged automatically every time you shut down, which is nice from a privacy perspective, and 2) if you have any expensive SSD's (like I do), it keeps unnecessary writes from degrading your disk. Of third importance, You'll basically get a few milliseconds slower access to web pages on the first load (but you'll always get the most updated version too), followed by near instantaneous revisits until your next shutdown.

For a long while I put my windows temp files on ramdisk too, but eventually stopped doing so. It actually worked rather well, with the only real issue being that Windows Troubleshooters would fail to work (not that they're usually that useful anyway, and I wound up having no need of them). But what made me ultimately put them back on the disk was realizing what it does to safe mode. In safe mode the ramdisk would never be created and the browser gets to pick where it places the files, which probably wouldn't be cleaned even by CCleaner later if your paths are still pointing to your ramdisk. And the number one use I've had for going into safe mode is to uninstall stuff. I can't think of many apps more likely to require creating temp files than uninstall programs. Also, in my observations, the windows temp folders never got that big, so that minimizes the "save the SSD" consequence. Browser cache files can get huge, possibly into the hundreds of megabytes in a single session. If you shut down your computer regularly though, you can probably get away with a 1 gig ramdisk for the caches.

So, for volatile ramdisk, browser caches yes, windows temp files no. I have heard claims that some MMO's, like Eve Online, can get a perceptible performance improvement by putting the game's cache on a ramdisk, but I haven't tested it myself. That cache you'd probably want to have mirrored on to the disk at shutdowns.

I wound up not using ROG Ramdisk because it lacks some basic functionality. I found Softperfect Ramdisk to be fully capable for the uses described above.

[RenegÉ_de]

Qwinn wrote:
For a long while I put my windows temp files on ramdisk too, but eventually stopped doing so. It actually worked rather well, with the only real issue being that Windows Troubleshooters would fail to work (not that they're usually that useful anyway, and I wound up having no need of them). But what made me ultimately put them back on the disk was realizing what it does to safe mode. In safe mode the ramdisk would never be created and the browser gets to pick where it places the files, which probably wouldn't be cleaned even by CCleaner later if your paths are still pointing to your ramdisk. And the number one use I've had for going into safe mode is to uninstall stuff. I can't think of many apps more likely to require creating temp files than uninstall programs. Also, in my observations, the windows temp folders never got that big, so that minimizes the "save the SSD" consequence. Browser cache files can get huge, possibly into the hundreds of megabytes in a single session. If you shut down your computer regularly though, you can probably get away with a 1 gig ramdisk for the caches.

You should really use a RAM cache for this. You wouldn't have any of those problems if you did. Use the subst command to map the temp directory to a drive letter, then create a RAM cache for that drive letter. That way, every write to the cache will cause a delayed or synchronous write to the folder mapped to that drive. You'll obviously want a performance benefit when writes are performed to that folder, so a delayed (or deferred) write back to the non-volatile storage might be preferable in this scenario, depending on how the application facilitating the RAM cache handles synchronous writes. One program that has the versatility to configure a RAM cache like this is called Primocache. It also supports persistent SSD-caching, which is pretty dɐmn nifty..

It never hurts to use a UPS when utilizing advanced cache scenarios like this, either.

[neiljwd]

Hmm. interesting stuff. I shut down my PC every night, sometimes multiple times a day.
Seems like it may not be suitable for me in my current situation. Thank you.

[sk2play]

neiljwd wrote:
I only game and internet.

I'm guessing the community has judged them with far more expertise than I'll ever have, are they recommended? Any particular setting?
Gene VIII+6700k, 16gb RAM, RAM 950 ssd, gtx970.

No, it will not benefit you at all for gaming and internet/office usage. In fact, it will slow your system down for such usage. You will fair better going to 32gb system ram then you would creating a disk ram drive for gaming 2K/4K

Ram Drives are better suite for specialty apps that will utilize them. Games will not be any better than more system ram.

Games look at in order
GPU/CPU RAM and/or cache (usually working in harmony)
System Ram
Ram Disk drive for virtual memory
SSD primary drive virtual memory
HDD is less effective as the primary drive for virtual memory as it is much slower than a SSD

Notice that a game will look for the available system ram before it will look for a ram disk drive.

When a game has no virtual memory as the last resource, you get lag, stuttering, hiccups etc. . . Other things can factor in here like the developer not coding the game optimally, but the sequence a game seeks memory is constant.

[SGMRock]

I have been using RAMCACHE on my Rampage v Extreme board as its ROG it works on that board. They recently added NVMe support too so my Samsung 950 Pro can take advantage of it. I find this really works well for games that are so large now that even with 32G of RAM they wont fit on a straight up RAM disk.

This new version though 3.01.06 seems to take ages to shut down. Sometimes if I don't stop it before I do a system shutdown at night it will lock up my system or it appears to lock up my system but it seems it because its shutting down the RAMCACHE master drive in the background. Maybe its the size i'm using, 12G of RAM for the cache that makes it take so long, not sure.

Other than that annoyance I'm pretty happy with RAMCACHE as a free ROG benefit. I found a good software on the market that does the same but cost like $70 or so. So free is nice!