Save Money on RAM.. with Optane??

[Emily Young]

Learn more about Intel Optane Memory: https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/architecture-and-technology/optane-memory.html

 

In a desert of high RAM prices, Intel’s Optane accelerator modules are looking like a pretty good alternative.. Does it have what it takes?

 

 

Buy a 16GB Intel Optane Memory Module:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/OBeho
On Newegg: http://geni.us/aBREvG

 

Buy a 32GB Intel Optane Memory module:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/00ht
On Newegg: http://geni.us/IePD6B

[Crazycatman]

More RAM equals better. I thought optane is for storage acceleration.

[williamcll]

I guess it works well enough for games. 

[unijab]

11 minutes ago, Crazycatman said:

More RAM equals better. I thought optane is for storage acceleration.

depends on the application.

[Crazycatman]

Just now, unijab said:

depends on the application.

Oh. I know rendering helps with more RAM. And VM.

[Hunter259]

Should have also shown 16GB + Optane to see if you can get even more speed out of it in ram limited scenarios. Using Optane as a cache actually could be useful given the cost of system memory for those that need a cheap way to speed out their workflow.

[King_of_Oz]

This is actually really interesting. If not a great idea, it might provide an incentive for ram companies to lower prices.

[Crazycatman]

Remember the Celeron 300 A? What if they move the cache off? Extreme OC again? They should make just a platform for overkill stable clocks, pointless but fun.

[lhsbrandon]

So was this test ran with the Optane just doing drive caching? What if it was a standalone drive dedicated to the swap file?

[AndyP]

TLDR: May we have the link to this software that enables Optane to act as RAM? Can this be used for Optane 900P?

 

 

Great Vid, let's hope Intel will continue on this path.

 

Back in Oct 2017 when I bought a 900P (M2/U2), I contacted Intel to get info on software that would allow the drive to be fully used as RAM. At least at that time nobody at Intel customer support had any clue about that.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/intels-first-optane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/

 

So is there any software for win10 x64 that allow that?

 

 

[Nicnac]

So, you're telling me to buy another overpriced product because one product is overpriced? ^^

[GetGud]

What software did you use to get the transfer speed?

[caked1393]

so how exactly do i go about doing this? seems worth a shot haha considering RAM is so expensive.

[Si3Rra_7]

Did they basically use the Optane module as a dedicated page file drive? Like setting it up in the virtual memory thingy ?

[navidanjum]

Can I install optane memory in my 7th gen setup?

[AdmiralKird]

You guys should make a follow up video using Optane to expand 8GB, 16GB, 32GB setups and see how/if any improvement they show to performance.

Most people have 8GB+ of RAM already, it's just that they're unwilling to upgrade with current prices and/or are out of existing DIMM slots. And I think most people would be willing to purchase an 8GB stick for a new setup rather than... 3GB... So now that you've proven Optane can provide a benefit to a raw, low-Ram setup in a control experiment, how much would Optane benefit existing standard setups' performance during high ram intensive workloads? Say in 4K After Effects renders/editing where they're constantly running out of memory... asking for a friend...

[Egg-Roll]

Closlier look? Ok, who gave Linus Rum again...

[System Error Message]

if you need a lot of ram and dont need the real time performance of ram, for instance perhaps you have a web server, i think this is one place where optane would save you a lot on having to buy ram. Think of database caches and so on, that instead of having to use ram you can use optane instead.

[Steven Smith]

I'm heavily considering this for a suitable work load that uses massive amounts of ram. To be clear, you just installed Optane as a normal drive and allocated it all to virtual memory in Windows, right?? The video was not to specific on this point

 

[BuckGup]

On 5/17/2018 at 2:56 PM, King_of_Oz said:

This is actually really interesting. If not a great idea, it might provide an incentive for ram companies to lower prices.

No it won't. A massive fine coming there way will though for all agreeing to raising prices because of 3 companies owning 98% of the worlds DRAM

[christian5437]

I'm just finding this now nearly 2 years later. I'm upgrading my HDD to an SSD so will have 32GB Optane with no purpose. This seems better than putting it in a box, but I don't know how to set it up as RAM. Can someone please explain? Thanks a lot!

[Abe-perspiration]

On 7/3/2018 at 10:34 PM, Steven Smith said:

I'm heavily considering this for a suitable work load that uses massive amounts of ram. To be clear, you just installed Optane as a normal drive and allocated it all to virtual memory in Windows, right?? The video was not to specific on this point

 

Hey guy. Did you tried this and works out ? The video Linus didn't point out the 'Windows already has functionality' is which way to do so.

[janos666]

I wonder how the PCIe 4.0 4x Samsung 980 Pro 1Tb compares to the Optane M10 16Gb as pagefile.sys handler because the latter is now dirt cheap (the higher capacity client Optane drives, although obviously cheaper than the original MSRP but not nearly as much as the smallest one of the family).

(I originally bought one of these to use as a swap partition in my home server which only needs swap during Gentoo worlds updates but I figured I shall benchmark it on Windows before I plug it into the Linux machine...)

 

I thought it would be easy to benchmark these drives by reproducing one of the tests presented in the video which showed a significant difference. I eventually found the Blender benchmark used in the video.

 

However, msconfig memory limiting doesn't seem to work in Windows 11 22H2. If I set 4096, it jumps back to 0 (zero) [*]. If I set 4000, it sticks but after reboot, all the 32Gb physical RAM is available. [* By the way, I actually can set 4096, I just need to iterate it up slowly by starting at 4000 and then 4010, 4030, etc, so this is clearly a bug in Windows in itself. But I set it to 4000 because that sticks even if I start from 0].

Is there a work around this? (Google didn't help much, I only found complaints and non-working suggestions.) Or do I need to remove the 4 8Gb sticks and plug in a 4Gb stick?

 

EDIT: I found the solution:

bcdedit /set removememory 28672

 

Ok, it was only 1 benchmark but it looks like it's actually better to place the pagefile on the 980 Pro.

Due to the amount of RAM+pagefile size needed to get the image rendered, and the limited size of the 16Gb Optane drive (13.2GB pagefile size), the results are close to each other with 12Gb RAM enabled (with only 10+13, blender crashes):

32Gb_RAM_13Gb_NAND --> 10:57

10Gb_RAM_13Gb_NAND --> 11:01 | 11:09

10Gb_RAM_13Gb_Optane -> 11:34 | 11:32

 

Also, utilizing the PCH M.2 interface (even just at half capacity) caused some issues with foreground tasks (I was watching a video during testing (from an SMB network share) and it hiched during the Optane testing (it might disrupted networking). This could be an AMD B550 thing that might be worth investigating (I mean, by someone else).

 

Edit2:

At first I didn't rule out the possibility that my network card - that's also attached to the PCH - was disturbed by the SSD's operations and that made the video playback disturbed, but then a synthetic SSD test on the M10 would have caused something similar.

 

Buuut... a 5 USD 13.6GiB swap partition will still be great for the home server where it will be compared to a SATAII SSD. (And that was the original idea.)