Opteron 170 vs 175... price / OC performance

[ripken204]

better ways? such as?

i know that there is not much space for this ram drive to do video editing. but their new reviosion will either hold 8gigs or 16gigs.

[Albuquerque]

better ways? such as?

i know that there is not much space for this ram drive to do video editing. but their new reviosion will either hold 8gigs or 16gigs.

The original question was not about adding an "external" ramdisk; the question was about using system ram as a ramdisk. On a machine with 2gb of system memory, when doing video encoding, there are better uses for that ram.

Ramdisks are good when addressing severe disk performance bottlenecks when dealing with a working set of files that are small enough to be contained within the ramdisk you provide. If you're dealing with more than ~10 minutes of raw video, your file will be bigger than his proposed 1gb ramdisk. Furthermore, outside of transferring the raw video from the camera, you aren't necessarily disk-bottlenecked when encoding the video to an MPEG / AVI / DIVX codec -- you're CPU-bottlenecked, and memory (bus!) bandwidth bottlenecked.

A ramdrive is NOT going to address a CPU or bus-bandwidth bottleneck, and in fact would likely make the latter even worse.