HUGE speed boost for entropia

Or you can have 16gigs of DDR3 ram in your computer :)
Tried Readyboost with Vista but didn't notice a change, never did try with win 7 though.
Damn now I want to go do some tweaking, if no-one see's me in game for awhile that means I got carried away with my tweaking and turned my computer into an android that rebelled against me and took me prisoner. :)

 

I use Readyboost on this sys, its a backup that turned into a main..... so its old and beef, running 7... when i was introduced to RB, i clocked it on 3 tasks with, and without. They came back the same results. I left the RB active its a small 4gig.... with win 7 i think RB will do 32 or 64gig.... which may help. Does anyone run RB with a large gig usb flash drive? or have any other results?

 

whats the differance in ready boost and virtual (hard disk ) ram
i'm adding 1, 7 latency stick of 4 gig ram to see if it helps any
most likly going to be adding another 1 of my video cards to run sli & see if that helps


i apologize for the redundancy
but i would like to ask as already has been
what is the lowest rb gig volume worth buying?
will a 4 gig stick do anything at all or do i need to use a 32 gig to see a difference?

 

Adding a thumb drive to use for ready boost is handy if you have an extra thumb drive lying around. However, you'd be better off adding actual RAM performance wise.

Either way it depends on how much RAM you already have. You will only see a big improvement if you are low on RAM.

 

jon do you think i'm wasting my time to go from 4 gig of ram to 7?

 

It would only be a waste if your running a 32bit OS

 

Probably what greyfox said. A 32 bit OS will not address more than 3.6 gigs of RAM, so if you're not running 64 bit it would be pointless.

After that it all depends on entropia. I haven't done any RAM usage tests so I don't know how much memory the game "needs" and uses. I wouldn't be surprised to see it use quite a bit though.

I know my system (3Ghz Core 2 duo, 4GB RAM, Radeon 4850) needs the graphic settings tweaked quite a bit to run completely smooth.

 

That I did not know. Will defiantly have to try, thanks.

 

Hey, we just finished chatting about this briefly in game. :)

It's 100% correct that it's taking over part of the hard drive's job, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have anything to do with the RAM. They are all related.

Check this out.
Imagine your computer like a house with a bunch of books in it and a huge shed full of books in the back yard. You can get the information from whatever page you're on instantly. You can get the information in the book pretty quickly. You can get information from a book on the shelf next to you pretty quickly too. It takes a little longer to get a book from a different room, and it takes a lot longer if you have go out back and dig through the ones in the shed.

The books you have on hand are like the CPU cache. Super fast, but not a lot can be stored there. The other rooms are like RAM, a lot more space but a bit slower. The shed out back is like the hard drive. Tons of space, but it takes forever to get the information.

Now, using readyboost is like adding another little shed right next to the house. If you can fit everything you're working on in the house and little shed then you never have to go all the way out to the big one. Everything will be faster.

But what if you could fit everything in your house in the first place? Then adding the shed wouldn't do much. That's why I was asking about RAM size. Having a lot of RAM is like having the big house. If you have enough, you don't need to go out back in the first place.

That concludes my lengthy analogy, hahah. Now here's the important information:
Kitten said she saw a big speed boost and she has 8GB of RAM. That means that anyone with 8GB or less RAM will probably see a big speed boost as well.

 

Newegg.com - Patriot Xporter XT Boost 8GB Flash Drive (USB 2.0 Portable) Model PEF8GUSB

on order and in the mail

 

John, I'm stealing your analogy to use the next time someone asks me to explain how cpu and ram works :)

 

By all means. I stole it from someone else in the first place. :) You can adapt it to pretty much any level too. Like if you want to do CPU cache, L1 cache can be the page you're reading, L2 cache can be the book, or whatever. I like it because it's very flexible as well.

 

Install an SSD drive and put your swap file and your most used apps on it, upgrade your system to 4gb ram (x32) or as much as possible (x64). 8GB ram and an SSD and you'll be REALLY surprised how fast EU can be, esp if you have a good video card and CPU. About readyboost... With Win 7 and 4GB ram or more, you won't have much of a gain because Win 7 uses unused ram for it's own caching quite effectively. If, for whatever reason you're still using Vista, readyboost will help some.

 

Caveat - If you are running a 32 bit system it can only use 4 GB of TOTAL RAM.

This includes video memory, and any memory on devices such as your printer, iphone, etc.

So if you have a fancy 1GB video card and 256 MB printer memory you will only be able to use ~2.8 GB of system RAM.

If youre going for performance computing do what Compusmurf said, otherwise. Install a SSD and put your OS / System files on it. Most games wont require it, they cache their textures on the video card keeping hard drive access at a minimum. But youll find a few that will also benefit from installing an SSD. SSD's are expensive though. A 200 GB SSD will easily cost you over $300.

The utility described in this thread though sounds like an intriguing way to add a secondary cache into the system. Im going to test it out on my home PC and give feedback. My home PC's only bottleneck is the hard drive, which I think is a 7200 RPM Western Digital (it may be 5400 though). At 8GB 1033 DDR RAM, Quad Core Phenom II 965 and a 1 GB Direct X 11 vid card on a 64 bit OS it is otherwise screaming. I'll post results on a few games here so people can see how well this utility might work for them.

 

SSDs are coming down in price very quickly and the 3rd generation is coming out. I've got my eye on the 60GB Vertex 2. I'm thinking there should be some sales soon.

 

Just to test I put a spare 4gig flash drive in for RB and noticed a slight boost. 16gig DDR3 ram(not sure of the clock speed atm) Phenom II 965 cpu. Think I've got a 7200rpm HDD 2gig video ram between two cards, 64 bit OS.
SSD migh be a better option but I have terrible file managment skills. :)

 

That you saw any boost at all with 16GB of RAM is mindblowing to me. This must be a very resource hungry game.

 

Like I said it was slight, wasn't even sure I was receiving a boost from it until I tried Star Ruler, a game that can be very resource demanding depending on how big a galaxy your playing in is and how many ships are involved in a battle.