WTF?! Now you may bypass your arduous drive and retailer your entire working system in your VRAM (do you have to need to). Nicely-known Home windows modder NTDEV has demonstrated how, and it is surprisingly painless.

The 1st step is to create a RAM drive in your GPU’s reminiscence. A VRAM drive, if you’ll. There’s an open-source instrument that may do it for you known as GpuRamDrive. It solely takes a pair clicks however the instrument was deserted earlier than it reached stability, so that you would possibly must strive it just a few instances.

Step two is to make use of your decide of instruments to create a digital machine. NTDEV used Home windows’ baked-in Hyper-V supervisor, which is a straightforward but highly effective instrument for spawning digital machines obtainable to Home windows 10 and 11 Professional, Schooling, and Enterprise customers. You will want to vary simply a few defaults in Hyper-V, and you’ll decide these out in NTDEV’s video.

RTX 3050 (desktop) with 4 of the eight reminiscence slots populated.

If in case you have an RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX or a GPU with greater than 20 GB of VRAM then it is best to be capable to squeeze a vanilla Home windows 11 set up onto the VRAM drive you created. For those who did not drop a grand on a brand new GPU this previous yr, you may have to make use of an alternate working system with much less demanding storage necessities. NTDEV makes use of Tiny11, a stripped-down model of Home windows 11 that he created.

We wrote about Tiny11 when it was launched in February. Marketed as Home windows 11 with out the bloat, its foremost purpose is to scale back Home windows 11’s system necessities with out sacrificing too many options. It strikes a great steadiness and even finds room for staple apps like MS Paint. Whereas it wants about 8 GB of storage to run on naked metallic, NTDEV exhibits that it may possibly run on a 3.5 GB drive when it is used for a digital machine.

NTDEV demo’d the idea on a laptop computer geared up with an RTX 3050 with 4 GB of GDDR6. He confirmed that the digital machine had no drawback creating and saving recordsdata to the 600 MB of free house he had. When he ran the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, he reached stable speeds of two GB/s studying and a pair of.5 GB/s writing, on par with PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives.

I can not consider a single motive why anybody would need to run Home windows 11 on their VRAM. And but, it is astonishingly sensible: fast to arrange and seemingly as quick and steady as a daily digital machine. Why not, then, I suppose?