Vengeance 32GB Memory Caching Performance Tests

So you just built yourself a new Intel® X79 based system using 32GB of Vengeance® memory and a Force Series™ GT SSD. It's already pretty fast, but you can make it faster by caching with memory! Similar in concept to our Accelerator Series™ SSD cache drives, you can use a DRAM memory to cache your SSD or HDD and get absolutely amazing read performance. A RAM cache allocates a chunk of your memory to store the most commonly used data from your main disk, making this data available to the CPU with rocket-fast access time. A RAM disk is very similar — however, it shows up as a different drive letter and files must be manually copied to it. In addition, if you lose power, everything on the RAM disk is lost forever, while the data in the RAM cache is mirrored in the hard drive or SSD.

The software used to cache the memory is called SuperCache 5 available from SuperSpeed for around $80. Setup is fairly easy and there are even a few options you can tweak to possibly get even more performance. For these tests I setup the software to use 16GB of the available 32GB. The rest of the options were left to defaults.

The test machine includes an ASUS P9X79 Pro running an Intel® Core™ i7-3960X Processor Extreme Edition with the 32GB Vengeance DDR3 memory kit (CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10). I used an NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 580 for my graphics card and powered it with a Professional Series® Gold AX1200 PSU. Finally I used a Force Series GT 180GB SSD for the SSD tests and a Western Digital® Caviar Green 1.5TB for the HDD tests.

The first test was PCMark Vantage, both the PCMark and HDD Suites were run. The memory caching gave the HDD almost a 10x boost in the HDD Suite and the SSD a 5x boost.

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Next up was Anvil’s Storage Utilities which benchmarks several aspects including response times and IOPS. As you can see below the SuperCache software and 16GB of Vengeance cache memory dramatically improved the read tests.

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I used ATTO to test sequential read and write speeds on the hard drive and SSD. The memory cache caused an amazing performance gain in read speeds. Hard drive read performance increased by 36x and the SSD read performance increased by 7x!

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The last benchmark was Crystal Disk Mark, which also saw huge improvements in read speeds. The hard drive performance increased by 46x and the SSD performance increased by 10x in sequential read speeds.

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In every benchmark memory caching gave a huge boost to read performance of both hard drives and solid state drives. Tweaking the caching options or raising memory frequency can result in even higher performance numbers. Since the memory is being used to cache, you are limited as to how much data can be cached on the memory. It also cannot cache operating system files which means it will not improve boot performance. Overall the memory caching provided very impressive results in all of the tests!