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Ramdisk or not...?

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GooieGoober
Miranda Regional Technologies
#1 - 2013-06-11 21:33:39 UTC
Hi, all.

I'm looking into gettting a new PC with 16-32gb memory. I was wondering if anyone has been using a ramdisk to run EVE when mulitboxing? I would like to run 1-4 accounts simultaneously (maybe even 6 in the future w/ 3 screens) on the machine, and was wondering if a ramdisk would provide better performance than just system memory. I read a few postings off google, but they were from 2009. With the new expansions and hardware out there, I am wondering if its worth the investment for that much memory. for $250 USD, I can get about 32gb DDR3.

I suppose an SSD would work to, but I think that the ramdisk would be even faster and not as prone to degradation.
Chribba
Otherworld Enterprises
Otherworld Empire
#2 - 2013-06-11 21:35:46 UTC
Your gfx card is more of a bottleneck than HDD. Lots of RAM and the use of junctions (or same client load) makes windows cache files in RAM already, works perfect for me.

gfx card however, is hot as hell.

/c

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Obunagawe
#3 - 2013-06-11 21:36:33 UTC
I run 10 clients on 5 year old PC with 4GB of RAM and get playable FPS. You don't need any of that ****.
GooieGoober
Miranda Regional Technologies
#4 - 2013-06-11 21:46:28 UTC
Chribba wrote:
Your gfx card is more of a bottleneck than HDD. Lots of RAM and the use of junctions (or same client load) makes windows cache files in RAM already, works perfect for me.

gfx card however, is hot as hell.

/c


Chribba, Thanks for the input. Lots of ram...and no ramdisk.

I'd like to get a GTX 770 as a primary video card with my 560Ti as SLI support to run the 3 screens, but I don't think I can swing it financially just yet.

My existing PC is an OC core 2 duo 5 yr old pc (at 4ghz) with 4gb ram on it, and with 3 clients running, it tends to get slow. all the clients would freeze when the screen saver changes pictures.
Tiber Ibis
The Paratwa Ka
#5 - 2013-06-11 22:34:37 UTC
Have to agree with Chribba here. Ram really isn't an issue if your running 4GB or more. Even 2GB and you might be alright. CPU is never an issue either. The graphics card on the other hand, the more power you have the better. Multi clienting is very graphics intensive particularly with high settings.
Sergeant Acht Scultz
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#6 - 2013-06-11 22:42:10 UTC
Tiber Ibis wrote:
The graphics card on the other hand, the more power you have the better



This, very often people tend to plug GC's in their PC when the PSU is clearly not correctly dimensioned, 750W is where serious business starts, under this and if someone wants to plug good GC's they will have trouble for sure and most of those they will never figure out it's from PSU and think it's the GC since their graphics are going make them funny things on screen and favorite games/programs.

removed inappropriate ASCII art signature - CCP Eterne
Barakkus
#7 - 2013-06-12 00:31:17 UTC
Use an SSD instead of ramdisk. Same thing almost, and I stress almost. You still have to deal with the bus speed of your drive controller etc, but still it's effectively the same thing. The longevity of a SSD is much higher than people think, especially with the ones out now.

Aside from needing a better graphics card this is what I just built in January:
1. Corsair Carbide Series 400R Mid Tower ATX Gaming Computer Case
2. Intel Core i7 3820 3.6GHz LGA 2011 Boxed Processor
3. Intel DX79SI Extreme LGA 2011 X79 ATX Intel Motherboard
4. Zalman CNPS9900MAX-B 135MM Fan CPU Cooler - Blue LED
5. Corsair Enthusiast Series TX850M 850 Watt Power Supply
6. Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3-2133 PC3-17000) CL11
7. Diamond AMD Radeon HD 7850 2048MB GDDR5 PCIe 3.0 x16 Video Card
8. Intel 330 Series 2.5" 180GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
9. Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7,200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"
10. Seagate Barracuda EP 3TB 7,200RPM SATA 6.0Gbps 3.5
11. LG 24x SATA Internal Desktop DVD Burner GH24NS72
12. Creative Labs Sound Blaster Recon3D Fatal1ty Professional
13. 3x Dell U3212HM monitors 23" 16:9 monitors.

Should be more than enough for what you want to do, might toss a little extra ram on it, but not really necessary.

http://youtu.be/yytbDZrw1jc
Mr Kidd
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#8 - 2013-06-12 02:47:49 UTC
Ram disk are only useful when data access times are concerned. As everyone else here is saying, GPU is the key to better performance. Now, if you're running a single drive system with multiple clients plus background programs all accessing the same drive you might experience a performance hit. These would be, generally, brief lag spikes of system performance, i.e. brief client freezes.

You can offset this by enabling resource caching which loads move game data in memory in exchange for less disk access.

If you have a dual drive system you might consider moving your page file to the second drive or move the clients to that drive. Or a ramdisk might be helpful in this situation. But, I have to question why you would need 16gb-32gb if you're not versed in the usage of ram as it pertains to system performance? My guess is you don't need anywhere near that much RAM and could spend that money on other things like a better GPU.

Don't ban me, bro!
Aprudena Gist
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#9 - 2013-06-12 02:52:15 UTC
ram disk would be silly just get a boot ssd for the windows install and the game ~64 -128 gig and then 1-3 tb hard drive for the rest
Littlest Kiwi
Blacklisted Bastards
#10 - 2013-06-12 03:24:49 UTC
Weird how no one has pointed out that you'd have to copy the client to the ram disk after every reboot........ With it being 10-15gb or so that would def take a bit of time, even from an SSD to ram.

Your much much better of with a couple of SSD's. Theres not really any need for 32gb of ram yet, unless you make use of it in some other application (ie Virtual machine, auto cad blah blah).


If your multi boxing a lot of client multiple graphics cards would be your best option, making sure they aren't SLI'd/Crossfired. So go with the best graphics card/s you can afford, with a decent quad core at least.
Jack Tronic
borkedLabs
#11 - 2013-06-12 03:27:08 UTC
A typical EVE client for me will use around 1GB of physical memory when running. So yea, its useful for more RAM.
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#12 - 2013-06-12 03:38:50 UTC
I run EVE from a USB2 disk. Disk I/O is not an issue with EVE, except for loading resources that you haven't seen before such as logging in to land on grid with 2000 ships all of different models.

The biggest boost tou can buy for your computer to improve the performance of this graphics intensive game is to get a fast video card with lots of memory.

As for that PC build earlier, I wonder if switching from CL11 to CL9 will shave another 3% or so off the loading of textures? I get improved performance from virtual machines in VMWare.

Day 0 Advice for New Players
sloany
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#13 - 2013-06-12 06:02:11 UTC
The bottleneck for eve is the CPU above anything else, having no multi-core support.
You can try setting your clients to use a core each and see if that helps, otherwise I'd look at upgrading your CPU first.
Having a 5 year old CPU you'll probably need to do a full upgrade.

I'm going through the same thing, my 6 year old quad core Q6600 has stood the test of time with games that support multi-core, it's just a shame eve doesn't.
Karsa Egivand
Sebiestor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#14 - 2013-06-12 06:51:28 UTC
I find the bottleneck is the memory of your graphics card. Make sure you got one with lots of on board memory.
Jack Miton
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#15 - 2013-06-12 07:12:16 UTC
Obunagawe wrote:
I run 10 clients on 5 year old PC with 4GB of RAM and get playable FPS. You don't need any of that ****.

at what? 50x60 resolution and minimum gfx settings?

There is no Bob.

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ISD Gallifreyan
ISD Community Communications Liaisons
ISD Alliance
#16 - 2013-06-12 07:33:13 UTC
All good advice given here.
I have also run the client off usb and class 10 SD cards.
the key for multi client is lowering the graphics settings of your extra clients.
a better graphics card memory as noted above doesn't hurt.

ISD Gallifreyan

Lt. Commander

Community Communication Liaisons (CCL)

Interstellar Services Department
Tiber Ibis
The Paratwa Ka
#17 - 2013-06-12 11:33:12 UTC
ISD Gallifreyan wrote:
All good advice given here.
I have also run the client off usb and class 10 SD cards.
the key for multi client is lowering the graphics settings of your extra clients.
a better graphics card memory as noted above doesn't hurt.

Yes that is what I do also. Would be nice if we could have customised graphic profiles built into eve actually which we can easily switch between as the current 3 options are a bit limiting.

Also, Eve barely tests my CPU when looking at performance monitor. I'm not sure if that is because I have a very powerful CPU or simply Eve isn't cpu intensive.
GooieGoober
Miranda Regional Technologies
#18 - 2013-06-13 00:12:08 UTC
Initially, I was running a GTX 8800 when I built the machine...and that was the bottleneck when playing. A couple of years ago, I switched it out for the 560Ti and now I'm seeing CPU utilization at 90-98% and memory at 3.8 out of 4gb used. I purposly don't have other apps running on this machine to maximize gaming. No virus scanner...I even shut off Steam. I don't surf the web on my game box to keep from getting infected/hacked. I have another computer to do everything else on (web, data storage, email, etc). By dropping the Ramdisk option, there is no need for 32gb ram. I think 16 would be more than enough to hold me over for a few more years.

Liquid cooling helped keep this machine living longer, but I think it may be time to retire the beast.
Hrothgar Nilsson
#19 - 2013-06-13 00:22:16 UTC
Robus Muvila
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#20 - 2013-06-13 01:47:30 UTC
ISD Gallifreyan wrote:
All good advice given here.
I have also run the client off usb and class 10 SD cards.
the key for multi client is lowering the graphics settings of your extra clients.
a better graphics card memory as noted above doesn't hurt.


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