TheVille

I'm intrigued by the concept of plugging in a usb flash drive and speeding up my computer by using it as additional RAM. Has anyone tried this?

Just buy and SSD! That will speed it up

RAM itself will be cheaper and more effective than that. All that would be is a USB drive acting like a swap file - aka, very slow.

I use readyboost. I use a eight gig flash card. I allow 4 gigs to be used. It speeds up the boot time but nothing to brag about. I only do it because I am not using the flash card for anything else currently.

Just buy memory. ReadyBoost might (not really) have made sense 4 years ago on a system with 1GB memory when Vista was out and memory was more expensive, now there's just no point.

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Alizée Fan wrote:RAM itself will be cheaper and more effective than that. All that would be is a USB drive acting like a swap file - aka, very slow.

Not to hijack OP's question, but how much RAM do you feel is best for TF2? I've read that it's more processor intensive but am mostly just curious.

iirc, you won't see a significant difference above around 8gb. I got a couple hundred fps on my old 8gb system without issue. My current system has 24gb, but that's never utilized. To be honest, framerate differences also aren't really perceptible beyond 30 or so for slow shots, or 60 for active ones. A person getting 60fps has the exact same experience as somebody getting 300fps.

Alizée Fan wrote:iirc, you won't see a significant difference above around 8gb. I got a couple hundred fps on my old 8gb system without issue. My current system has 24gb, but that's never utilized, and what increase in framerate I have is due to other factors (framerate differences also aren't really visible to the naked eye beyond 30 or so for slow shots, or 60 for active ones).

Gotcha, sounds like 8 gb is the winner. Would an SSD improve gameplay loading? During loading times it looks like my HD is doing a lot of work.

An SSD would indeed improve loading times for levels and such. When a map changes, it's a fair bet that some of the earliest people to load in are SSD users.

Do you know what your current drive is, offhand?

Alizée Fan wrote:An SSD would indeed improve loading times for levels and such. When a map changes, it's a fair bet that some of the earliest people to load in are SSD users.

Do you know what your current drive is, offhand?

I'll have to take it out and look at it, but the specs from the original quote are 250GB SATA 6.0Gb/s and 8MB Data Burst Cache.

If it's a SATA 6.0Gb/s drive, and is plugged in to a SATA3 slot on your motherboard, data transfer speed is not itself overly likely to be the problem. If it's a 5400RPM drive, that'll do it in pretty badly though.

The other thing is to check if it's heavily fragmented. Even the fastest platter drive will slow down dramatically if it's badly fragged.