Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage: NVIDIA's G70, Athlon 64 BTX and more

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• michaelpatrick33 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  Or, you could put a whole Linux distribution on that and have some fun!
  
  Of course another drawback is that it is a 32bit PCI card, so you will only get a maximum of 133mBps sustained to the south/north bridge thus limiting it further. Still way faster than any hard-drive though.

• AndreasM - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  Ah yes, use a ramdisk for the swap file so the computer doesn't slow down when swapping data to it from ram. Or not.
  
  #17 has a point though, this would be useful for Intelists that have moved to DDR2 and still have their old DDR-sticks around. Though it would probably be a better idea to just sell those sticks and buy more DDR2 :P

• stevty2889 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  #12 I think using that gigabyte ram drive for the swap file would be an excelent use for it, good idea!

• Icehawk - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  I want that RAM-Disk. Here's why - I have a gig of older DDR ram that is essentially worthless. How about using the Ram-Disk for your virtual memory swap file? Ah... now you see the possible benefit?
  
  :)

• Tanclearas - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  I thought the idea behind BTX was to improve cooling through better air flow. Why would they place the IDE cables directly in-line with the CPU, and the power and SATA cables all nearly in-line with the CPU?!
  
  

• Matthew Daws - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  What I don't quite get with the solid-state drive is: Why not just increase the amount of ram you have, and let the O/S use it as it sees fit, either for a huge disk cache, or for applications if they need it. This should actually be faster, as the OS can intelligently decide what data to buffer in ram; and with 64-bit nearly mainstream, you don't have a 4GB limit.
  
  The only issue might be that you'll have to spend a lot more on RAM you want to put on your motherboard than the dirt-cheap stuff you'd put on the Gigabyte board; but surely 2GB of extra system ram would be better than a 4GB Ram-Drive?

• mjz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  yea, maybe if they have 8 slots and ram is 50 dollars a gig.

• mattsaccount - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  The solid state drive would also be useful for photoshop/video editing scratch disks, or for the windows page file.

• MDme - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  hey, you can put winXP onto that ramdisk and just have that. I mean if you use that as your OS partition, it will rock. maybe use a minimal XP install without the bloat-ware...maybe even a 512mb swapfile there. (I wonder how fast will boot times be???)
  
  OR
  
  just use the ramdisk as the swap file. that would still be a boost. (you won't have to worry about the volatile ram either)

• AnnihilatorX - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link

  2GB should be enough for just Window
  
  but if you want "a" game on it... 4GB is just enough