Anyone using Asrock's new Xfast RAM utility?

[Bloodlust]

I have 16gb on my E4 G3 mobo. Currently using another ramdisk utility which provides up to max of 4gb as it can't go beyond that without a license.

From asrock's youtube video, it states compatibility with Windows 7 32-bit. So I am wondering if it will work on Win7 x64 and is the R/W performance comparable to the other ramdisk utilities out there.

Lastly, since it's integrated into AXTU will the application be loaded automatically at startup everytime?

[burty_477]

Re: Anyone using Asrock's new Xfast RAM utility?

Ive just upgraded to z68 and started using this utility and I can confirm that it does work with Win 7 x64.

I cannot comment on other ramdisk utilities but using hdtune I get an average read speed of 5503MB/s, thats on 8gb Corsair 1600mhz vengeance.

Yes it is loaded at startup and just appears as a normal disk in my computer.

[ramon zarat]

Re: Anyone using Asrock's new Xfast RAM utility?

From what I know, Xfast RAM is a RAM disk on steroid. So it's aimed at anyone who needs a RAM disk, 32bit or 64bit OS. The extra features of this utility (as per version 2.09) are:

1- Can indeed map and make available RAM beyond the 4GB limitation of a 32bit OS, but confined to the RAM disk only. So if you have a 32bit OS with 8GB of RAM, the OS will only "see" 4GB, but Xfast RAM can create a 4GB RAM disk with the unused RAM left.

2- Can emulate a "ready boost" partition mapped to the RAM disk to accelerate your magnetic hard disk drive, just like an SSD would do. If you already have an SSD boot drive or a small SSD acting as a ready boost drive, this option is useless to you.

3- Option to automatically move your memory pagefile to the RAM disk. 1 click in the Xfast RAM interface, reboot and you are done. No messing around with windows config.

4- Option to move temp and cache of Internet explorer and Firefox to the RAM disk. Again, 1 click in Xfast RAM interface, reboot and you are done. No messing with windows config.

5- Option to move both (and independently if you like) the system temporary files and/or the user temporary files to the RAM disk. 1 click in the ... you know the drill.

You can assign any free drive letter you want to the RAM disk. You can choose the size of the RAM disk. Apparently, it csn support RAM disk size of 8GB for 64bit OS and 32GB for 32bit OS. I benchmarked the RAM disk with Diskmark and got 9800MB/s sequential read with a i5-2500K OC to 4.7Ghz and 8Gb of RAM @ 1866 10-9-9-28 1T (ASRock Extrem4 GEN3). Got very similar result from another Ram disk utility. Xfast RAM is the most versatile RAM disk utility I've ever tried.

NOTE: Beside the obvious gain in speed, this utility is highly recommend to SSD users to limit / reduce write operations that will degrade your SSD.

NOTE2: With 8GB of RAM in my PC, I've created a 1GB RAM disk and it's more than enough for the vast majority of scenarios. I've only encoutered limitation with archiving utilities such as Winrar and 7zip. Both app have the option to specify the temp folder of your choice if you need to create archives larger than the maximum capacity of your RAM disk.