what's up guys I'm Dmitry with Hardware Canucks and today i'll talk about Intel Optane
memory in what situations it should be used and in what situations until my
face challenges so in though often memory aims to accelerate performance of
your system by Ram caching bits and pieces of a most frequently used program
so things loads faster now it's not a new concept by any means of imagination
but it is a new hardware implementation that is fast it's affordable and it's
adaptable so let's talk about all that right after this
you can only rely on the pros to do the job with every keystroke satisfying like
the millions before it
call it close every key regardless of your state kula master master keys bro
take it with you make it yours and so this is what the Intel optane memory
module looks like it's using a standard ender to interface that is available in
16 and 32 gigabyte capacities inside of which is intel's new 3d xpoint memory it
is only single sided so as you can see only the memory is on this side nothing
here so until often is supposed to actively learn your usage habits and
accelerate the load times of programs that you use the most it uses algorithms
that are very similar it's not identical to intel's older SSD caching
technologies and it's still not much has changed you cannot select which programs
are accelerated nor does it have any more features than ssd caching
you'll pay forty-four and seventy seven dollars for those capacities and we find
that the 32 gigabyte module to be in a challenging spot as its competing with
similarly priced 120 gigabyte SSDs while the 16 gigabyte opting module sends free
of competition and just because your motherboard might have and ends up two
slots it does not mean that it will support obtain memory because you
require a z270 motherboard and a 7th generation Intel CPU for optane memory
to work because the microcode is compatible only with that hardware
specification another most notable limitation Intel optane memory is it
will only accelerate your primary boot drive so where your OS is installed if
you have secondary drives in your system when it has your game library or other
applications it will not accelerate your secondary storage so primary only which
I would see is limitation enthusiasts like to spread their stuff through
separate drives but this really comes off can reveal the question of the
target audience for not really the mainstream audience but system
integrators and the notebook space will definitely you know benefit from Intel
optane and I say this because Intel often aims to address the slow
performance of spinning hard drives without that chunky price premium well
hello people this is the sleeper PC that Intel sent us with the Intel optane module
a very unique I might say you know quite old Wow look
at that paint job mmm so anyway this beeper PC here well that
sound Linus would be proud but anyway so if
respects here we have an ace USB 250 motherboard we have 16 gigabytes of RAM
wasn't there's the 1 terabyte hard drive and then Intel optane module which is 32
gigabytes we have 550 watt power supply very basic system so it's booted up see
how fast this thing boots with optane on and off and launched some games to
see if we can feel in your real world acceleration three two one go alright so
the first test is the Windows boot test and I decided to leave this one running
in real time as I thankfully forgotten how long a system boots off a hard drive
since moving to an SSD only workstation machine but was often enabled this is
after like a fourth boot here we're actually pretty speedy at 21 seconds for
the desktop to appear while with optane off it's a bit slower to get into
Windows but only about 10 seconds slower
and now for some gaining test now we launch the game and load the save games
twice so things in cash into optane so opening your hammer is much faster with
optane it's very close to a savvy performance while loading a game save is
a little bit slower versus a hard drive only but significantly slower versus how
fast the game loads from an SSD launching virus that one shows similar
results with optane matching the speed of an SSD while loading a game save
gives us only marginally faster load versus the hard drive only but an SSD is
still far superior and this leads me to believe that
optane is only caching some information one is trying to load save games versus
caching a lot more into optane when loading the game engine itself and you
can see that by the significant in acceleration when trying to launch the
game is much greater with optane on vs. what we see in the acceleration when
trying to load game saves and then opening Adobe Photoshop CC with almost
all toolbars enabled there is a significant speed increase to load this
program with optane enabled almost just as fast as an SSD so that was all fine
and dandy and you can definitely see the performance improvement with the
spinning hard drive and until optane but we have some concerns primarily there's
no way to know of how much memory has been already occupied by the caching of
your most frequent programs so therefore you cannot you know how do you choose
between 16 of the 32 gigabyte models there's no bar graph to see how much you
filled up and I would say for the consumers that's fine because it's a
simple plug-and-play solution but it's also is a sort of a compromise for the
enthusiast market who potentially want to tinker with exactly what applications
you want to accelerate but none of that is available so it's a simple
all-or-nothing approach which is a negative and a positive and the next big
concern for us would be price at $77 for the 32gb memory module you can pick up
just for $13 more a 275 gigabyte SSD that is both faster and just you know
has so much more capacity that you can use for your OS drive or your gaming
drive so you know alongside the hard drive so it really kind of makes a
difficult choice on whether you should purchase the Intel optane
module to accelerate your hard drive when you can just buy an SSD and lastly
it's simply not wise to pair an Intel optane module with an SSD because value
is simply not there so guys thank you so much for watching it's been an
interesting experience you know learning on what this thing does and really the
main downfall would be that lack of software customization on what software
and applications until often accelerates at least for me that is but what do you
guys think of Intel opting let me know in the comments down below I'm Dmitry
with Hardware Canucks Eber so yeah thanks so much for watching we'll see
you in the next video