32GB RAM With ASUS RamCache II With No Virtual Memory; Is This OK?

[nomisuke]

Greetings! This is my first post so I will do my best to include everything about my system.

 

Back in October, I built a decent mid-level rig. It is composed of an ASUS ROG STRIX H270F MOBO, an Intel i5 7600K Kaby Lake quad-core processor, 16GB of Mushkin DDR4 2400 RAM, an MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GAMING X 4G GPU, and a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 SSD. There are several other storage drives in the system, but Windows 10 Pro is installed to the 960 EVO for maximum throughput. It's also important to note that the H270F has a dedicated M.2 Socket that does not share any SATA ports like some other boards. I am able to use all 6 SATA ports and the EVO in the M.2 socket without issues.

 

I've been using ASUS' "RamCache II" app for several months in order to use part of my RAM as a hard drive and have been extremely happy with the results. I'm seeing read/write speeds up to 13.8 Gbps with files in the 2MB range, which is about 10 Gbps faster than with the EVO alone (using ATTO). I'd like to completely remove the virtual memory from my system to see if it would speed things up, but I'm afraid because I still find myself using 80-90% of my RAM while gaming and running a web browser at the same time. Back in the day when I was still using XP (that's ex-pee and not a squinting raspberry) I would jam as much RAM into my system as possible and then remove the paging file to stop the system from using the unbelievably slow HDD to store RAM data. This time I took the liberty of completely removing the indexing options when I first built the system because, as I understand it, paging is pretty much useless when using an SSD. However, I'm wondering if I can also remove the virtual memory to speed things up just a bit more. I'm thinking I basically already did that by removing all of the indexing, but I'm not sure. And to clarify, the title says 32GB of RAM because I will be doubling my modules in a few days. I just wanted to wait until then to try anything fancy like completely removing the paging file. Yes, I understand that, in the event of RAM failure or the system maxing out the RAM, I may lose access to valuable data. However, nothing I do on my PC is so important that I can't just pick right back up where I left off, even in the event of near-catastrophic failure.

Thoughts?

Edited April 28, 2018 by nomisuke
Add info

[KarathKasun]

Some things will not run properly without a page file.

[i_got_laid_by_a_dragoness]

1 minute ago, KarathKasun said:

Some things will not run properly without a page file.

That's false. I've been running zero page file for 5 years without problems.

[Husky]

I wouldn't remove the pagefile, just leave it alone at Windows default settings, or manually set it to something like 4 gigs. Windows is much more advanced these days and the pagefile is used for many things and can speed up the system in some cases, especially with an SSD. Windows generally knows what it is doing. There is no benefit to disabling it.

 

TLDR: just leave the pagefile alone, there is no benefit whatsoever from disabling it.

[KarathKasun]

10 hours ago, i_got_laid_by_a_dragoness said:

-snip-

Many older games that do not have a 64-bit executable but use tons of RAM and some Adobe programs for sure.  Black Ops 3 crashes after a bit without a page file for example.  Premier and After Effects will eat your 32gb of RAM and then cause other apps to crash.

There are more examples, but its been quite awhile since I ran a no-page setup.  That setup was a dual socket workstation with 128gb of ram back in ~2010, and the occasional run through fixing things was exceedingly annoying.  Just set a ~1gb page file and be done with it, performance was the same in 99% of cases.

[AngryBeaver]

34 minutes ago, i_got_laid_by_a_dragoness said:

That's false. I've been running zero page file for 5 years without problems.

You can technically run without a page file, but the longer you run even with 32gb the more this program used too much memory and must close messages and or warnings you will get.

 

That is because users the pagefile to optimize what stays in memory and also allows it to remove/overweight memory space without issue. If you don't have a pagefile lots of data will stay in memory due to how windows handles memory that could potentially cause pause of data.

 

So your memory usage will continue to consistently climb until you perform a restart.

[nomisuke]

Thanks for all the responses.

 

So what is the point of having the option to set the pagefile to zero these days? The basic gist I'm getting is that setting my pagefile to zero has almost no effect while utilizing an SSD, and we haven't even touched on whether or not running a RAM cache program would impact the performance either negatively or positively (or at all). If my RAM is operating at 2400Hz, which I know is still about 4x faster than the throughput of the M.2 socket (3.2 Gbps vs 13.8 Gbps), wouldn't using a pagefile still slow things down in some cases? Granted, I would most likely never notice it either way, but the seed has been planted, and now I must know the answer. Should I try running a stress test like RealBench for 15 minutes to see what happens? I'm not using any type of software that would suck up 32GB of RAM just yet, but I may delve into video and graphics rendering in the future just for sh**s and giggles.

Also, can't we all just get along? There's plenty of room for name-calling and opinion suppression on the YouTube channels.

Edited April 28, 2018 by nomisuke
Redundancy

[KarathKasun]

2 hours ago, nomisuke said:

Thanks for all the responses.

 

So what is the point of having the option to set the pagefile to zero these days? The basic gist I'm getting is that setting my pagefile to zero has almost no effect while utilizing an SSD, and we haven't even touched on whether or not running a RAM cache program would impact the performance either negatively or positively (or at all). If my RAM is operating at 2400Hz, which I know is still about 4x faster than the throughput of the M.2 socket (3.2 Gbps vs 13.8 Gbps), wouldn't using a pagefile still slow things down in some cases? Granted, I would most likely never notice it either way, but the seed has been planted, and now I must know the answer. Should I try running a stress test like RealBench for 15 minutes to see what happens? I'm not using any type of software that would suck up 32GB of RAM just yet, but I may delve into video and graphics rendering in the future just for sh**s and giggles.

Also, can't we all just get along? There's plenty of room for name-calling and opinion suppression on the YouTube channels.

 

The RAM cache sounds like a good idea, but going from SATA III to NVME is a similar increase in bandwidth with minimal impact in most cases.  The benchmarks will make you feel better, but the real world results are not usually much different.

 

Games for example, most of their data is compressed or encrypted in one way or another and the CPU becomes a bottleneck in the loading process.

[nomisuke]

I ended up just letting Windows manage it on the NVME drive. Both after reading these comments and watching this 4-year-old video.