Gigabyte i-RAM Review 7/7
Bluetooth 26 Sep 2005

Conclusion

Old concept reigns with new innovative ideas added on. Gigabyte has again proven that innovating solutions do have its value in this competitive market. i-RAM came at the right time when RAM is cheap and you could use this device as a fast access storage device which needs no additional configuration.

In a separate test, we installed a copy of WINXP into the i-RAM. As WINXP requires at least 1.2GB of space to get installed, we managed to squeeze in 2 pieces of Corsair DDR module with heat spreaders into it. As the slots are tilted at 30 degrees to the vertical, it is not easy to insert these modules. As for ram compatibility, as far as I know, any ram ranging from DDR266 onwards to DDR400 will work as the clk is actually running 133MHz. This is to maximise compatibility as users will most likely use older unused modules for such purposes. In the manual, there are a list of compatible ram modules that are tested to work with this device.

WinXP installation was quite smooth and it only took us 15 minutes to complete. The disappointment came when we rebooted the system and hope it FLIES into Windows. That didn't happen. It took around 16 seconds to go into WinXP. I would suspect it could be due to the bottleneck at the SATA I interface.

I think this product could have been better if the JMicron SATA II controller be used. That might help a lot in the speed. In fact, the interface shouldn't be limited to just SATA II, what about PCIe x1? If PCIe, which is scalable, it would mean you need to install drivers. That defeats the purpose of i-RAM (driverless).

Overall, i-RAM is an innovative product which I feel would be well accepted. My usage would be probably for storing multimedia or split the partitions on it as swap drive for photoshop.

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