So I've been gnawing on this 32-bit 4GB barrier in Windows XP for a while. I would love to have more than 4GB of RAM in Windows XP. Of course, we know that that's not possible. But I came up with an idea to cheat the system...

I bought a Gigabyte i-Ram card, and put 4GB of RAM on the card. I formatted it for FAT32(apparently it works better for swap file partitions) and I put a 4GB swap file on the i-Ram. Granted the SATA bus speed is only 1.5Gbit/sec, but the fact that the random access times are <0.1ms, I'd say that makes it a very viable alternative. The boot times of the computer are faster, and I can see a marked increase in performance when multitasking and using alot of RAM.

The only other thing I can think of that might make things even faster would be 2 cards on RAID-0.

Anyone else try this and have any additional recommendations or opinions?

If anyone is wondering what an i-RAM is, it's a PCI card that has 4 RAM slots on it. You can put up to 4x1GB sticks on it, and it has a SATA plug for you to plug it into your SATA controller. It uses a PCI slot for power only. All data transfers are via SATA.

Here's a link if you want to look at it:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Product [...] GC-RAMDISK

Why not just buy a 64bit OS?

**edit**
It is a very interesting idea i would love to see some system benches before and after using the i-ram

Not a bad idea in itself since windows always wants to use the swap. More memory never quite seems to fix that issue.

Of course you'd be better off with a good SSD since all the files still have to come off the hard drive initially. Considering the pricing once you add in the cost of memory, its actually cheaper per GB to buy an SSD... $119 or so for the card + $40 or so for memory (4x1GB max) is $159 for 4GB, not exactly cost effective.

THe card itself would have to be much cheaper for me to be interested, maybe $40.

Brilliant idea. But sounds too brilliant to be true.

One catch, right off the bat is that it is only 184 pin RAM, ie., DDR RAM, only up to 400 MHz.

I see there are 3 such products on the Gigabyte website--and they were first introduced in 2005. This implies that they haven't taken off in the market. But then again, was there much of a concern for even more than 2 GB RAM back then?

There was a review of it back in the day. The problem is that it is pricey: was $150 in the review. http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312

Did you find it for sale anywhere?

I agree with Grieve. Why not just buy a 64 bit OS. Its cheaper, far less hassle, and if anything goes wrong, far easier to diagnose and repair. If you don't want to go with Vista, there's still XP64, which is a very good and stable OS. I've had XP64 for a long time and have yet to have a problem with it.

I don't think you're cheating anything by doing that... those iRAM cards were made to put RAM to use as a high speed disk. If someone had 4 GB of DDR and were upgrading to a DDR2/3 rig, I can see being tempted to buy one of those things... everyone else? Nah. Not really.

Agree, It's not cheating.
A Swap file does not break the Limit in Any Manner.

It makes the use of a Swap File Faster, but that is it.
And a Decent SSD would be just as cheap, almost as fast, and give you more room to do stuff.

Yah, Zen - My off-the-cuff reaction was "Thumb Drive" when I read this too. Not quite the same here, though, since you have some added bandwidth the system can possibly take better advantage of. Nice idea to set it up as a swap file/drive. Still, it's not like <The OS Which Must NOT Be Named> doesn't have the facility to set this up for you automatically...

I am going to go with the majority on this one...64bit OS...add some more DDR2 for your system memory. By the time you get that RAM card, add memory...you are looking at a large chunk of change. 64bit addresses your needs without additional *cludgy* hardware configurations...just add RAM.

I considered it cheating because I can still use my 32 bit OS with only a modest performance hit, vice using the hard drive swap file. I refuse to "upgrade" to Vista, and the 64bit version of XP just doesn't work very well for alot of applications. In particular applications that I have to use on the system.

I considered the SSD option, however if I used the SSD there would be a few drawbacks:

1. Since I can't afford 2 SSDs, I would want the boot and pagefile to be on the same disk, so the performance of the SSD would be limiting when loading an application(you'd be loading the application at the same time you are paging to disk).
2. SSD has a finite life span. RAM doesn't wear out if I read and write to it forever.
3. SSD are so damn expensive.(an SSD isn't just as cheap zenmaster, although the cost per GB might be)

I was going to attempt to use a thumbdrive, but the performance is just too low when using it over USB. USB isn't very efficient for data transfers.

The DDR isn't actually a limitation. DDR-266 gives transfer rates of 2100 MB/s for single channel. That significantly exceeds SATA speeds of 1.5Gb/sec(or approximately 119MB/sec).

I would do a benchmark, but how do you do a benchmark on the system using pagefile? Sure I can benchmark the system, but with 4GB of RAM already, I'd expect the swapfile to not show a significant performance increase.

This would have made sense if you need fast access to large files (ie Video/image editing). Should have just gotten a x64 OS.

See what supremelaw has to say about RAM Disks here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] w=0&nojs=0

Vista is good on a newer machine, if you have 4gigs of ram it’s actually better then XP I think.

Eventually you will join the Vista bandwagon. Now that SP1 is out it is a good time to get your self vista64 Premium or Ultimate

The "Mojave Experiment"
http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

Not that it's any of my business, but in my opinion it's time most of the people who "refuse" to use Vista to reevaluate the OS and their position. Vista performs very well with a semi-new system and 4gb of memory.

If you're using ancient hardware or outdated software that isn't compatible with a 64-bit OS or Vista, then there's a really good chance something newer and better is out there.

My system is quite new, 8GB ram, Q6600, 8TB hard drive space on RAID 5... but I refuse to upgrade because every computer I have seen Vista on, including fresh installs, crawled compared to a fully installed XP system.

I've started using Linux because of the problems I've seen and heard in Vista. Yes, I have SEEN as well as heard. I'm not one of those people that just blindly listens to what other people say about it, and just agree. I checked it out for myself. I bought a laptop with it preinstalled, 3GB of ram, and a 10 minute boot time to get to windows on that system is just unacceptable. Windows XP loads with all of the software I have installed on it in 1/2 the time.

I won't be installing Vista on any computer I own. After XP is obsolete, I'll be completely weaned onto Linux.

Cyberjock the machine i just sold had a Q6600 with 4gigs of ram and Vista64 Ultimate... It was blazzing fast. Your machine would own Vista and be comparable to XP.