Nice to see you back in the saddle, wanna ride that pony to the store and pick up some coca cola~?

What in the hell do you need 16 gigs of ram for???
Glad you enjoy your new pc but it sounds like youve put unnessisary money/heat into it with that upgrade

i need to start making a drinking game for every time somebody asks me that xD

my simple answer is always: Heavy gameplay, and Software Development xD

I usually tell them 16GB = 8 - 12GB system RAM plus a 4 to 8GB RAM disk.

A 4 or 8GB RAM drive is insanely useful for TEMP and cache files for browsers or anything else that requires a scratch area (Second Life's cache, just as a random example), where you want higher performance than a standard hard disk and you don't want the burden of all those "junk" writes going to your SSD which has about 5000 P/E cycles per cell (why write it if you don't have to).

How much of a performance increase is this? Ive never heared of being able to do somthing like that, youve sparked my interest.

I will run some of the standard benchmarks tonight and get you exactly numbers. Crystal DiskMark and ATTO, probably. Maybe iometer but that one takes a little setup time. The numbers, even compared to SSDs, are astronomical because you're writing and reading to/from RAM at the speed of RAM. The performance difference is orders of magnitude. How much of a difference this makes to your applications depend upon the nature of how the application accesses the disk.

So here's a quick benchmark of the performance difference between a 4GB RAM disk and a 7200RPM 1TB mechanical hard drive:

http://gskill.dyndns.org:1331/benchmark.png

The filesystem used on both drives was NTFS with default options.

The RAM disk numbers will get a little more impressive once I get around to tweaking my system - I just finished building it and haven't had time to adjust the CPU or RAM timings yet.

While the sequential transfer numbers look really impressive, the 4K transfers are what most accurately reflect the average user's experience (editing of large videos and the like aside).

From the benchmark, you can see that the RAM disk is approximately 1500 times faster than a mechanical drive.

For reference, here are the numbers for a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3:

Seq read: 497.4MB/sec
Seq write: 167.3MB/sec

512K read: 434.1MB/sec
512K write: 168.5MB/sec

4K read: 36.23MB/sec
4K write: 99.27MB/sec

4K read (qd32): 118.5MB/sec
4K write (qd32): 164.7MB/sec

So system RAM (642MB/sec 4K read) is approximately 17 times faster than the latest generation of consumer-grade SSD (36.23MB/sec). You probably won't notice a difference between the two but a RAM disk spares all those nasty "junk" writes from being sent to your SSD which has an approximate life of 5,000 program/erase cycles per cell.

More information than you ever wanted.

Ohhh, i see.

Wouldnt have guessed you developed software, my bad :3 i guess that could justify the insane amount of ram

Sounds like something I got for my deployment XD. Have one of the Asus republic of gamers laptops. I love it

Thatssssss a mighty nicccccce laptop you got there. Be a ssssssshame if sssssomething were to happen to it. *Creepers* :C

no! bad Mab! Bad Mabby! No rotisary chicken for you D: *Defends laptop with his life*

Yaaaaay! Ducky's back!

Congrats

Holy freaking beefy laptop :O That's awesome ^_^ Have you tried playing anything on it?

I wonder if I can syphon some of that ram. 16? Shit.

Ahh, that does indeed sound impressive from what little of the technobabble I was able to decipher.

More numbers means its better!

Woo! Welcome back!

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Sweet machine.