I have a windows PC with 16GB of RAM.
It appears that running cgminer in a 4GB AMD Radeon Memory RAMDisk has increased the overall stability and throughput when mining.
AMD RAM Disk Software 4.0 (free):
http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_4.0.phpWatch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xhtfMGUTLEA - How it works
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8xYSvmP_tUU - Best Use Cases
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZxZsy7ETNvw - Advanced Configuration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRgbRE-knX0&feature=player_embedded - Double your SSD Speed
If you can't use a 'Striped Volume' to link the RAMDisk because you have a standard HD or perhaps some other reason (make sure your watched 'Advanced Configuration' to format the RAMDisk correctly), you can probably also use Properties > 'ReadyBoost' to make most of the RAMDisk available back to your system, whilst keeping a fixed percentage of the new drives space free for cgminer mining in RAM.
Don't get me wrong, this won't get you a higher hash rate, but it does increase stability and throughput. Its also very funky!
I'm discovering all sorts of ways that this can be useful with scrypt based coins (with memory intensive mining) and linking said dedicated RAMDisk's with FPGA boards to get increases in performance, stability and throughput.