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24GB vs 32GB for iMac retina similar performance?

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I used to sell Ram at Egghead Software for over $50 per MEGABYTE. Yup, try and grok that for a minute... $200 for FOUR Megabytes of Ram. OUCH double ouch!

In more modern times, I am a Ram junkie. I always had 16GB.

However, I find that 8GB in my iMac is just fine. I am very surprised, and I consider myself a power user. But I see absolutely no reason to bother with more.

And believe me, the computer is plenty fast.
 
in response to meister:

in fact you are the one who does that and you are using lines that were used against you against others.

you are in every ram thread on macrumors advocating this and being rude to other users. it's a religion for you. it's shocking to see you when casually browsing again and again. all year.

ram is dirt cheap and used for more than app memory. mac os x uses all the ram over time.

to the op: 24gb is enough. and it's gonna be better than 8.
 
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cycledance said:
to the op: 24gb is enough. and it's gonna be better than 8.
Click to expand...
That is nonsense.
For what the OP is doing, 24gb is not better than 8gb.

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cycledance said:
you are in every ram thread on macrumors advocating this and being rude to other users. it's a religion for you. it's shocking to see you when casually browsing again and again. all year.
Click to expand...
And you've read all of them :D
 
Meister said:
24gb memory for this:
I hope the OP is joking.

What is it with these ridicolous RAM threads lately?
Click to expand...


Dear Lord, my mother does this on a 4GB of RAM Mac mini easily.

When 32GB of RAM comes to the MacBooks, the 16 vs 32Gb of RAM threads are going to be horrendous. RAM requirements have stagnated. I don't know why every ones thinks they need 16GB+ of RAM. The Engineering Computer Labs only have 4GB where design we entire highway interchanges in CAD at my university. It's getting ridiculous.
 
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cycledance said:
in fact you are the one who does that and you are using lines that were used against you against others.

you are in every ram thread on macrumors advocating this and being rude to other users. it's a religion for you. it's shocking to see you when casually browsing again and again. all year.

ram is dirt cheap and used for more than app memory. mac os x uses all the ram over time.

to the op: 24gb is enough. and it's gonna be better than 8.
Click to expand...
But Meister is right.
Why would you keep recommending something the OP clearly has no use for?
 
Meister said:
If you are telling me that 2gigs RAM are not enough to run the apps the OP is running in Yosemite, then you just have not enough experience. Use a macbook air with 2gb RAM and then use any other Mac with 32gb or 128gb with the same apps the OP is using. You will find no noticable difference in performance.

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I don't know what you are using your Mac for, but your memory pressure will never get yellow or even high green from what the OP is planning on doing.

We've reached a point of diminishing returns for CPU and RAM.
Any of these upgrades are reserved for people with very special needs or get a thrill out of spending $$$
The entry Macs sell with 4gb and the pro models with 8 to 16gb. There are reasons for that.
Click to expand...

Well to be fair we are talking iMacs here and all iMacs even the new super duper entry model comes with a minimum of 8gb. Apple sells an iMac with a 1.4 ghz dual core processor, Intel HD graphics 5000, 500gb 5200RPM HDD and yet still has a MINIMUM ram of 8gb. Certainly if they could obtain satisfactory performance with less then 8gb of RAM that machine would have it.

The reason I said I cringe at using Yosemite with 2gb is because of my experience with Mavericks with 4gb on a since upgraded work machine.

There maybe a certain level of opinion of performance we are dealing with here too. What you might find a satisfactory experience and I may not, even when it comes to the OP's requirements.

Kind of like an SSD vs HDD. It wasn't until I used one that I found the HDD to be lacking. So overnight I went from being perfectly content with an HDD too much preferring an SSD.

As far as what I'm using my iMac for, games like WoW, ESO, Simcity, etc. Video encoding. Media center to stream iTunes. Sometimes all at the same time although I try not to encode while gaming because it slows the encode to a crawl. I bought my iMac with pretty much what the OP had in mind.
 
cynics said:
Well to be fair we are talking iMacs here and all iMacs even the new super duper entry model comes with a minimum of 8gb. Apple sells an iMac with a 1.4 ghz dual core processor, Intel HD graphics 5000, 500gb 5200RPM HDD and yet still has a MINIMUM ram of 8gb. Certainly if they could obtain satisfactory performance with less then 8gb of RAM that machine would have it.
Click to expand...
No. The mba and mac mini come with 4 and they work perfectly fine.
I have those machines at home. I have put them next to each other and the mba with 4gb seems the most responsive and fastest. Faster than my rmbp with 8gb.

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cynics said:
The reason I said I cringe at using Yosemite with 2gb is because of my experience with Mavericks with 4gb on a since upgraded work machine.
Click to expand...
Whatever experience you had there was not based merely on a ram upgrade.

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cynics said:
There maybe a certain level of opinion of performance we are dealing with here too. What you might find a satisfactory experience and I may not, even when it comes to the OP's requirements.
Click to expand...
And again: For what the OP is doing any Mac runs exactly the same!

Again: I have put different Macs next to each other and there is no difference in performance!

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cynics said:
Kind of like an SSD vs HDD. It wasn't until I used one that I found the HDD to be lacking. So overnight I went from being perfectly content with an HDD too much preferring an SSD.
Click to expand...
No. no. no.
Ram is not like an ssd. There is no difference in performance unless you actually require more RAM and that is rarely the case. A ssd upgrade on the other hand will make everything more responsive immediately, because response times to access the secondary storage are constantly strained and 1000times faster than an hdd.

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cynics said:
As far as what I'm using my iMac for, games like WoW, ESO, Simcity, etc. Video encoding. Media center to stream iTunes. Sometimes all at the same time although I try not to encode while gaming because it slows the encode to a crawl. I bought my iMac with pretty much what the OP had in mind.
Click to expand...
The OP didn't mention video encoding and games. Video encoding is mainly dependent on cpu performance.There is no game that I know of that would utilize more than 8gb memory, in fact a few months back I posted several reviews that showed that gaming benchmarks went down! with having more than 8gb ram.
 
Meister said:
24gb memory for this:
I hope the OP is joking.

What is it with these ridicolous RAM threads lately?
Click to expand...

Wow! That was helpful. Noise.
Meister said:
24gb memory for this:
I hope the OP is joking.

What is it with these ridicolous RAM threads lately?
Click to expand...

I don't understand your comment. I came to this forum precisely because I had the same question. IMO, it is altogether a reasonable question. Furthermore,I don't understand what your comment adds to the discussion.
 
my memory usage, tracked with iStat menus
Screen Shot 8.png

I have 24 GB.

See all that black space-- amounting to a a good 8-12 GB?

Never touched-- maybe used as disk cache.

Here's the thing:

Suppose you have 4 GB. You end up using 5-6 GB, and one particular process tends to not like paging to disk, or compression, depending on how recent your system is. You put in an extra 4GB,and all is well with the world. Now you have a persistent 2-3 GB free.

Suppose you have 8 GB in a new machine. Remembering your pains with earlier machines, you double your RAM for "headroom". Guess what? Out of that 16 GB, the system only needs 5-6 GB. So now you have 10 gigabytes free. Over time, Apple's OS may be able to take advantage of this extra memory, and you start not to care about running twenty tabs, and apps, once launched, stay launched. But all this profligate use of memory won't really cause you to need more than 12-16 GB.

Apps really need to be designed to use a lot of memory. Virtual Machines grab memory in large chunks. Photoshop is a voracious consumer of RAM. Preview can consume a lot of memory-- if you use 270 MB PDFs with memory intensive compression techniques.

But for regular every use, it's good to keep in mind that going from 8 to16 GB really does add twice as much memory as going from 4 to 8GB...

On the other hand, if you have user accessible ram slots, ram is cheap. There's really very little downside aside from wasting a bit of cash.
 
aevan said:
For example, for Photoshop, even while working with large files, is quite fine with 8Gb RAM - "pros" or not. Also, no modern game requires more than 8Gb RAM.
Click to expand...


Uh yeah no, I have 8gigs on my laptop, and trying to work with PS with anything but minor editing is extremely slow.
 
lacoleman said:
Wow! That was helpful. Noise.


I don't understand your comment. I came to this forum precisely because I had the same question. IMO, it is altogether a reasonable question. Furthermore,I don't understand what your comment adds to the discussion.
Click to expand...
You came to this forum because you were asking yourself wether to get 32gb of ram for office work and webbrowsing?
You think that's a reasonable question?

How about a Mac Pro? You can stick 128gb in.
 
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[MOD NOTE]
Old thread and we're now veering into bickering. Closing this discussion down.
 
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