WTF is this thing? – RAM on a PCI Card??



Linus Tech Tips makes entertaining videos about technology, including tech reviews, showcases and other content.

32 Comments on “WTF is this thing? – RAM on a PCI Card??”

  1. Holy shit, that means all the shitty DDR 1 memory sticks I freely found in PC cases everywhere on junk week could have actually been a super profitable venture if coupled with this interface system as a form of drive storage!, extremely intriguing!

  2. The volatile memory would be awesome for physical data security, if you expect the feds to raid you, they confiscate your hardware, power is gone POOF all incriminating data gone as soon as they pull the power cable and they wouldn't think twice about pulling the plug when bagging the hardware.
    I wonder what speeds a thing like this could get if made in 2019 with modern interfaces like M.2, USB3 point whatever and SATA-3

  3. At first I was like WOW I had tons of useless DDR1 RAM I could have used this. But then I realized I would have like 2GB max.

  4. That caping out at 133 MB/s is not entirely true because when Intel introduced the ICH2 controller back in the day of the socket 370 Pentium III Coppermine and Tualatin found on boards like the Asus TUSL2 or CUC2 that had up to PC800 Rambus support the buses internal PCI bus bandwidth was supposed to be up to 250 MB/s or something like that, so with whatever newer Core 2 duo motherboard you were probably using the ICH version probably made it a lot faster than ICH2.

  5. Such an impressive approach for a tech that was released in 2006 but sadly was not that practical.Oh the good old Xp days!

  6. i was just a little interested and wanted to read the description to see if ireally wanna watch the video.. the only thing to read is a shitty advertisement..

  7. Would it be possible to do the same thing now with high-speed high-capacity DDR4 RAM using PCIe 4.0 ? Would be interesting to see how fast it would be compared to NVMe SSDs

  8. Hey Linus, great video, but a little bit of a mistake (and I'm not sure if you want to make a Part 2 to correct it) but these things were not primarily used as boot drives- You saw how impractical this is. They were primarily used to store the Pagefile, and potentially other temporary files like Photoshop the scratch disk (which was notoriously a hog on PCs at the time). Perhaps you would like to re-bench either with a modern PC or period-accurate PC to demonstrate the difference. A synthetic compared to the most basic of SSDs would be great too.

  9. Awesome video i have a channel related to this type of videos where i'm working on reviews of products i hope you guys have a visit also can sub to my channel if you want 😀

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