Press Conference Cont’d

But the coolest new technology Gigabyte introduced is called i-RAM. Taking a page from $500+ solid-state storage solutions, i-RAM allows you to use your spare DDR memory as a hard drive. And as you probably know, using DDR memory as a storage device will give you more than 20X more I/O performance than a standard SATA hard drive.

Gigabyte demonstrated this increased I/O performance by running PC Mark 2004 on both storage devices, with the SATA hard drive scoring 3912 while the i-RAM device scored 56560. The maximum amount of storage on the i-RAM is currently 4GB, which would require four separate 1GB DIMM’s on the device. Gigabyte said that they successfully installed and ran Windows XP on the device, but said it is mostly aimed at A/V capture and 3D Design applications, as the 4GB maximum capacity will not allow for much storage headroom with an OS installed.


Gigabyte then introduced a magician who performed a few illusions and then brought out two models that had Gigabyte’s new Intel 945G and 955X i-DNA motherboards in hand. The event ended with a raffle for a Pentium 4 570 and a Gigabyte 955X i-DNA motherboard.