Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

What About ReadyBoost?

Fundamentally, ReadyBoost accelerates a situation that you rarely want to be in: when your system is paging to disk. While it may be nice to accelerate those situations, you don't want to be in them to begin with. We've looked at ReadyBoost performance before, and largely concluded that while it can improve performance, if you are regularly depending on it for a performance boost it's probably time to add more memory to your system.

We revisited ReadyBoost with today's article, using a test similar to one we conducted in our Vista Performance Guide. We opened up Adobe Photoshop CS3 along with 91 6MP images, we timed how long it took to load all of them.

You can see there's a tangible improvement with ReadyBoost enabled, reducing the total load time by 24 seconds even with 1GB of memory, but the improvement itself is only around 7% quicker with ReadyBoost than without. Moving to 2GB of memory on the other hand nets a 33 second reduction in load time, or 10%. The lack of improvement going to 2GB indicates that we aren't swapping to disk too much to begin with, but 1GB was the smallest base memory size we had on hand at the time of our tests.

Obviously adding another GB of memory is more expensive than adding ReadyBoost, and in this case ReadyBoost can give you close to the same performance as adding the extra memory. If you look at more memory limited situations, such as those illustrated in our Vista Performance Guide, ReadyBoost is painted in a different light - as a bandaid solution to a problem that is better solved by adding more memory to your system.

The real benefit of ReadyBoost is somewhere in between those two extremes, but for the most part we don't see a significant use for it in systems with a good amount of memory to begin with.