The iram uses a fpga

haha, one of the examples in your original post (eevblog) is mine. I passed that card onto a friend just recently. In the end though, while it was good for my purpose at the time, the limits of SATA 1 killed it's usefulness to me.

For the 3.3v the little buck converter commonly available on eBay was ample and I was running it with the maximum amount of ram possible (4GB IIRC)