8 replies to this topic

[Napoleon_Blownapart]

my gigabyte mb died and i bought a newer asrock mb that has a feature called xfast ram.my comp has only 4g ram and a 120g SSD and 2 hard drives and win 32.does anyone use this?where does it create the ram drive?can i set it to my HD or a flash drive?any info would be appreciated.

[Hougham]

It just looks like it uses a RAM drive for virtual memory. Basically as a swap space for data. However interestingly it allows 32bit OS to in a round about way make use of more then 3.5gb of RAM. Worth a try at least I guess as it may make some useful use of the left over RAM your OS could not use. Though I don't know how much useful space it would create with only 4gb of RAM to start with. It also may slow some things down like MWO. Only one way to know though.

Edited by Hougham, 24 June 2014 - 01:55 PM.

[Napoleon_Blownapart]

ok thanks, i was hoping i could use flash or hd memory as ram didnt think it was ram as ram.till i get more.

Edited by Gorantir, 24 June 2014 - 08:50 PM.

[Catamount]

You can use use an HDD as RAM; that's what the page file is. It's also entirely miserable, but at least it's not limited to 32-bit address limits (it is, but only per pagefile), for whatever that might be worth.

Edited by Catamount, 25 June 2014 - 06:06 AM.

[Napoleon_Blownapart]

ok, i have the 1 user 3comp win7 32 and 64 disks.if i added another 4 gigs am i better off running win7 64 or using the added 4 gig as ramdisk with win7 32?

clarifying my question, xfast ram could set the extra 4gigs in 32bit os as xfast,when i see the benchmarks on a 32bit os its improved over the initial 4 gigs,but is 8gig 64bit faster overall?

Edited by Gorantir, 25 June 2014 - 09:44 AM.

[ninjitsu]

Real ram is soo much faster than using a hard drive, even an SSD. If you want more than 4 gigs of ram, yes you need 64 bit Windows.

[Catamount]

Honestly, at this point, there is no reason, whatsoever, to run a 32-bit operating system. 64-bit is where it's at, and has been for several years.

The only advantage to a 32-bit OS is that you can run 16-bit Windows executables (basically, Win95/98 programs), at least, in theory, and there are other ways to go about that if it ever became necessary.

[ninjitsu]

Catamount, on 25 June 2014 - 01:19 PM, said:

Honestly, at this point, there is no reason, whatsoever, to run a 32-bit operating system. 64-bit is where it's at, and has been for several years.

The only advantage to a 32-bit OS is that you can run 16-bit Windows executables (basically, Win95/98 programs), at least, in theory, and there are other ways to go about that if it ever became necessary.

I agree
Unless there is a mission critical application that forces the use of a 32bit OS, there's never a reason to avoid 64bit. It's time to live in the future!

[Catamount]

Basically, if you absolutely have to use a program so old that it has a 16-bit Windows executable, use a virtual machine

For DOS programs, use Dosbox.