I've been hearing people talk about utilizing RAMDisks to make both gaming and system performance better, smoother, and quicker. I was wondering what models you guys would suggest and if there are any downsides to using those?

Anyways, good advice on the computer. I might be upgrading soon too so it'll come in handy. Good luck with your new PC, Envie42, let us know how it turns out :D

By "people", you wouldn't happen to mean "Pescado" would you?

A RAMDisk isn't a particular type of hardware - it can be anything, from a hard disk to a pen drive, which you tell Windows to use as one big RAM stick instead of for storage. If you know what the paging file is, a RAMDisk is basically a massive paging file. The theory is that using RAMDisks essentially increases the amount of RAM in your machine, but it's really not that simple.

While the way Windows uses a disk - as either RAM or ROM - does make a difference to speed, real RAM is always faster just because of how it's built. Getting an extra few gigs of RAM will increase your performance far more than plugging in a 12Gig USB stick and using it as a RAMDisk, unless for some reason you're storing huge amounts of data in RAM which you don't need to access quickly, in which case you might as well just make your existing pagefile bigger. A RAMDisk is faster than a regular pagefile in theory because a RAMDisk is necessarily otherwise empty, so the computer doesn't have to sort through a load of other data in order to get to the RAMDisk data: but the noticeable improvement is negligible, unless the HDD on which your pagefile is stored is a twenty yearold IDE which goes at about 10rpm, in which case you have bigger problems. If you're one of those who hates theoretical slowness, put your paging file on its own partition and make that the first partition on the disk. Same effect.

The best thing to use as a RAMDisk would probably be an SSD drive, since they're the fastest storage on the market right now. However, an SSD is still slower than real RAM, and, well, it's a ripoff - most small SSDs are still in excess of 30Gigs of space, and you're never going to use more than a few hundreds megabytes of that unless your machine is a salvage case (in which case it's probably the CPU, not the RAM, which is causing any slowness or choppiness you're seeing).]

Since your question isn't related to the thread you posted in, I'll split it off.

Actually, some guy did a video blog about it showing Need For Speed Underground which really caught my eye, it was lightning fast. However, I do admit seeing Pescado commenting on it a couple times.

Anyways, thanks for the feedback, I probably won't get one for Christmas.