New PC - advice with ROG STRIX Z390-F GAMING motherboard utilities - ramcache 3

[jam1e1]

hi

Just got my new PC specialist PC - 2nd one ive bought from PCS, its great and going to do review soon. Got question on utilities, what's people's opinions on Ramcache 3 app? my spec is i7-9700K (3.6GHz) 12MB Cache , 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE RGB PRO DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB), 1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3300MB/W) - not sure if really needed or will improve in any way? thanks Jamie

 

[SpyderTracks]

99% of mobo apps are bloatware. When it comes to PC’s less is more.

 

[jam1e1]

thanks - removed that, also happened to look at CPU usage and the 'game first' app was eating 15% so uninstalled too!

 

[ubuysa]

I'd not heard of RAMCache until now, but from what little I've just read it's just a RAM disk. RAM disks create a virtual drive where the data is stored only in RAM, this has one advantage and several disadvantages....

Advantages
RAM disks are accessed at RAM speeds so the performance of a RAM disk exceeds any other storage drive type.

Disadvantages
RAM is volatile, so when the PC is powered off the contents of a RAM disk are lost - unless written out to permanent storage first.
RAM disks must be created and their data loaded every time the PC boots.
RAM disks use RAM, which means less RAM is available for all other processes - they thus only make sense in large RAM environments (I don't believe that 16GB is large enough to make it worthwhile).

RAM disks were popular when RAM costs began to fall sharply a few decades ago and yet HDD speeds had improved only marginally. Today, although RAM is relatively even cheaper, non-volatile NVMe drives are multiple orders of magnitude faster than HDDs and are a much better investment.

The bottom line is that a RAM disk will make a big difference to the one (or few) applications that access that disk and they work best where data is constantly being written as well as read and where the data access patterns are fairly random, but they do reduce the amount of RAM available in the system and they have to be managed (created and loaded at the start and then saved at the end). You might experiment with it to see what size RAM disk works best for you balancing the needs of the application(s) using it against the RAM needs of everything else. My gut feel though is that with that big NVMe drive in there you won't need a RAM disk.

 

[jam1e1]

thanks Ubuysa.

Overall i dont find the ASUS software very user friendly - not clear on purpose with many of their apps as just has a name with no description, also a bit bug ridden
i.e.
- the armoury crate update suite does not install the LAN drivers properly on mine, had to do manually
- also it reports the latest update driver versions as 'lesser' versions that that installed i.e. it cannot seem to determine which is more current, as basic number parsing script could determine that
- the BIOS version it doesn't indicate what version is installed and could lead to unneccessary bios flashing, layout inconsistent format from other apps

overall love the PC though, super fast and no plans to tweak

 

[ubuysa]

thanks Ubuysa.

Overall i dont find the ASUS software very user friendly - not clear on purpose with many of their apps as just has a name with no description, also a bit bug ridden
i.e.
- the armoury crate update suite does not install the LAN drivers properly on mine, had to do manually
- also it reports the latest update driver versions as 'lesser' versions that that installed i.e. it cannot seem to determine which is more current, as basic number parsing script could determine that
- the BIOS version it doesn't indicate what version is installed and could lead to unneccessary bios flashing, layout inconsistent format from other apps

overall love the PC though, super fast and no plans to tweak

I have no knowledge or experience of Armoury Crate but I wouldn't use an Asus tool for installing drivers in any case. If you're running Windows 10 then Windows Update makes an excellent job of finding and installing all the right drivers, though other 'control' tools (like GeForce Experience) have to be manually installed. If Windows Update couldn't find a driver I'd be going straight to the vendor's website rather than an Asus (or any other) tool.

There are a few ways of displaying the installed BIOS version, the easiest (assuming Windows 10) is to use the msinfo32 command. As to unnecessary flashing, PCS require customers to ask them before updating any BIOS in order to protect the warranty. That's actually good news in most cases because PCS will also tell you whether there is anything in an updated BIOS that your build needs and whether there are any issues reported by other customers with that updated BIOS.