importance of M/board qaulified vendors for RAM and RAMdisk

[steven_191]

firstly, the QVL for RAM. Im looking at it and I dont see what I want.

How important are these things? Theres a fair amount of people out there who say you should follow it but is that really for the best 'proved' performance? surely any suitable RAM will work.

Secondly, Im looking into RAMdisk. Ive never done it before but wondered about how the computer would go about using this. Its a bit technical.
If I were to get 2x4GB RAM sticks and set 4GB as a RAMdisk would that automatically be partitioned onto the first stick then continue using the rest of the space( and the second stick) for more RAM usage?
If I were to set a RAMdisk of 2GB would it allocate 2GB on the first stick or does it just add up data in blocks until its full whether im using lot of RAM or little RAM?

The only reason Im asking is because I saw something about the motherboard putting data onto the stick from say a starting point and adding on in a line, so if you put the sticks in the wrong ports youre effectively leaving a gap that the motherboard will see empty ports and look for the next available stick. Im guessing in terms of performance this may be negligible but I was just interested to see what people thought. Or hopefully knew.

[el_oso]

I have never had a stick or RAM of the correct specification i.e DDR/DDR2/DDR3 that has failed to be recognised. Some DD2 sticks were put into motherboards that were nearly 10 years newer than the mb.

As for the RAM disk, I would at least have 4Gb still available to the system after the RAM disk has been allocated. In real world performance RAM is 10x faster than fast SSD's, so the way in which it is allocated probably doesn't matter.
What is your reason for a RAM disk?
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[Seb]

Ramdisk is fairly pointless these days, an SSD will boot quicker as you don't need to load the entire OS image into memory first and against a current generation SSD you'll stuggle to see any real improvement in responsiveness once windows is going. To capitalise on it you need to have your applications loading from that ram disk too which requires huge amounts of ram.

As for as where to mount the ram on the board, read the manual and look at how the memory channels are laid out. Typically you'll have 4 slots going something like red/black/red/black. You'll usually find the red slots will be channel 1 with the black slots being channel 2. For the best performance you'll want to ensure both matching sticks of ram are on the same channel to ensure you get dual channel mode and the extra bandwidth it provides. Using both channels adds a small amount of latency but you won't notice it outside of benchmarks.
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