40 GB of RAM worth it?

[Chancha]

I got my 40GB iMac setup for 10 days since I got it, not rebooted once after TM migration, the page in is ~20 million and page out is like 60. I doubt the system could do pull that number if it had 16GB or less.

The economical question is if stock 4+4GB, with after market 8+8GB = 24GB would be enough. My own answer to that question is that, throwing in 16GB modules is a longer term investment, never know if I want to max the machine out later.

 

[mmomega]

If you need to ask, then no.

If you're an average user 16GB is plenty. If you run a lot of pro software and virtual machines, 32GB will improve performance. 32+GB is in most cases, a waste of money.

This pretty much.

But if you're someone that hates keeping money but loves unused depreciable items, go buy all the RAM you can get.

More RAM for the Magic Mouse and Keyboard as well and the ethernet port.

 

[SaSaSushi]

As mentioned, if you plan on running Windows in a VM then 8GB will inevitably lead to hair loss (from pulling it out). 16GB may or may not be sufficient, depending on what else you've got in memory. I found that 32GB was the sweet spot for me with Windows VMs.
I have 40GB now because the new iMac supports up to 64GB and I wanted to leave open the possibility that in the future it might be desirable to max it out.

Again, what your system needs is based entirely on how you're using it. I get a good chuckle at those who will try to tell you too much RAM is bad for you or anything over 16GB is burning money.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

The answer here is, to summarise everyone, is to assess how much RAM you actually use and how much that may go up over time with new apps or processes, and then buy accordingly.

Basically do your homework its not a question anyone can answer for you, no one can know what you use how you use it and what your plans are, if you don't understand how RAM works how your computer uses it and what you yourself need, then learn, all that knowledge is only a google search and a twenty minute you tube video away.

 

[glazball]

Again, what your system needs is based entirely on how you're using it. I get a good chuckle at those who will try to tell you too much RAM is bad for you or anything over 16GB is burning money.

I agree with this. While it's true that the OP may be wasting his money by maxing out 64GB or RAM, it's his money and all that RAM will not hurt anything.

And to follow that through, OP may not have much use for more than say, 8 or 16GB right now - but who knows what the future will bring or what OP may want to do with his computer in 2 or 5 years. It's much better to have the memory to be able to do some project, than to realize 5 years from now that he can't (either well, or at all) because someone told him he doesn't need more than 16GB and not to waste his money.

(And luckily, all this is a rather moot point since we can easily add or remove RAM however we like in our 27" iMacs, now or in the future.)

 

[Fishrrman]

Unless one is earning money from the computer by doing video production, etc. ...
NO. It's not "worth it".

Then again, some folks have $$$ to throw away...

 

[SaSaSushi]

Unless one is earning money from the computer by doing video production, etc. ...
NO. It's not "worth it".

YEAH! "8GB ought to be enough for anyone."

Actually, although the famous 640k quote attributed to Bill Gates was never actually uttered by him, he did say this:

"I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

Those are some words of wisdom.

 

[hagar]

YEAH! "8GB ought to be enough for anyone."

Actually, although the famous 640k quote attributed to Bill Gates was never actually uttered by him, he did say this:

"I’ve said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."

Those are some words of wisdom.

1. Nobody here said 8GB is enough
2. Quoting Bill Gates here is irrelevant. According to that logic 100GB would even be better. No one involved in computers would ever claim that. Because, as pointed out above, software would not take advantage of it.
3. If the original poster is an average user, he will never need more than 32GB in the lifetime of his Mac, and in the rare event he does, macOS is more than capable of handling this. It's not like his Mac will beachball all the time if he doesn't buy at least 40GB.

 

[throAU]

i'm not sure why there seems to be such an aversion to buying memory on macrumors. maybe it's some sort of inbuilt defence/protection mechanism for apple being stingy with ram...

up to 16 GB is a no brainer in 2017. unless you're a masochist, in which case, buy a crappy chrome book. yes today you can make do with 8. but you're going to presumably keep the machine longer than this year.
32 GB vs the cost of a machine you can install it in is a nominal amount vs total machine cost.
64 GB or more starts getting expensive. (relative to total BOM)

so with that in mind, my current recommendation is

16 GB unless you're being really tight fisted
32 GB if you're a typical power user

if you need more than that you probably know better than my recommendations above.

again. in terms of total BOM cost, 16 GB is not a large portion of the cost. it just isn't worth skimping on.

you'll see far more benefit from more ram than going up 1-2 steps in cpu most of the time.

cpu clock only affects you when your machine is running 100% cpu load for extended periods. and most people's use case just doesn't include that outside of very infrequent use.

[doublepost=1499753321][/doublepost]

RAM has speed and latency figures. This "timing" that we talk is latency, also otherwise known as CAS. Speed is 1600MHz 1866MHz 2133MHz etc.

What you need to do is match all the sticks you stick in your computer. Get the lowest possible latency with the highest possible speed your computer can support.

Now, buying higher latency means observable snappiness differences can occur. More than the perceptible difference in bus speed. A slower latency will be more noticeable than a faster speed.

no.
memory timings will not affect ui snappiness and in general hitting the pagefile due to memory starvation is a massively more performance degrading problem than memory timings.

on intel cpus outside of skylake X, ram timings (especially the minor difference you may need to make to run more DIMMSs) make so little difference (as intel cpu cache is so good) to regular applications as to be virtually irelevant.

unless you're running skylake X or ryzen (which no macs currently have), or are shooting for synthetic benchmark numbers, really high ram speeds are mostly snake oil.

ryzen and skylake X are different but that's because the ram speed affects the cpu differently and the core to core communication is dependent on it on those CPUs.

 

[SaSaSushi]

1. Nobody here said 8GB is enough

When a user with 8GB asks if he needs more RAM and is told "no" what does it mean exactly?

2. Quoting Bill Gates here is irrelevant. According to that logic 100GB would even be better. No one involved in computers would ever claim that. Because, as pointed out above, software would not take advantage of it.

Not to beat this to death but the point is (again) that how much RAM a user needs is entirely according to their own usage. You cannot have too much RAM, especially since such needs are bound to increase in the future.

3. If the original poster is an average user, he will never need more than 32GB in the lifetime of his Mac, and in the rare event he does, macOS is more than capable of handling this. It's not like his Mac will beachball all the time if he doesn't buy at least 40GB.

I'm not so presumptuous as to speak for the original poster nor to have a crystal ball to know what their future requirements might be nor to even know what their gender is.

Again, there is no such thing as too much RAM, only enough RAM and that amount varies per user.

up to 16 GB is a no brainer in 2017. unless you're a masochist, in which case, buy a crappy chrome book. yes today you can make do with 8. but you're going to presumably keep the machine longer than this year.
32 GB vs the cost of a machine you can install it in is a nominal amount vs total machine cost.
64 GB or more starts getting expensive. (relative to total BOM)

so with that in mind, my current recommendation is

16 GB unless you're being really tight fisted
32 GB if you're a typical power user

I couldn't agree with this more and as the title of this thread suggests, actually, since the iMac comes with 8GB at minimum that means many of those power users are adding 2x16GB for 40GB now with the option of up to 64GB down the road should the need arise.

Others are finding 2x8GB of their own RAM added to the Apple RAM for 24GB to be their sweet spot.

 

[jerwin]

There is no such thing as too much RAM, only enough RAM and that amount varies per user.

Depends on how firm your budget is. The iMac, unlike a PC build, isn't infinitely customizable, but maybe $140 (cost of the additional 16 GB you don't really need) could be better applied somewhere else.

 

[SaSaSushi]

Depends on how firm your budget is. The iMac, unlike a PC build, isn't infinitely customizable, but maybe $140 (cost of the additional 16 GB you don't really need) could be better applied somewhere else.

I would not call that a problem of too much RAM but rather not enough money. Even most casual users can benefit by going from 8GB to 16GB nowadays and it's not going to be less need in the future either.

Anyway, I don't recommend that anyone buy RAM from Apple. If you can't afford to add RAM now and really need that money for some other upgrade of course try to make do with 8GB and buy what you need.

You can always add RAM later.

 

[throAU]

you can have

not enough ram: performance suffers horribly
"enough" ram: this is a sliding scale of price vs performance. for any typical application there's a point where you get diminished returns for addding more, and the cost also scales up severely beyond a certain point
ram surplus: you have more than enough which may marginally improve performance, or enable you to do other things more effectively while your machine is running a major work load or job.

currently, if you can take 4 DDR3 or DDR4 DIMMS, 32 GB is the sweet spot (where cost hasn't started increasing significantly vs. resource purchased and benefit vs. typical end user workload)

if you're limited to 2 DIMMS (e.g. laptop), 16 GB is the sweet spot.

you want either enough, or a surplus - else you're just leaving significant performance improvements on your very expensive machine on the table for minimal additional outlay relative to what you already spent.

cheap != "good value", and crippling an otherwise expensive machine like a mac with insufficient RAM severely diminishes the value you get in terms of $ vs performance

 

[Bob418]

There is no such thing as too much RAM, only enough RAM and that amount varies per user.

Well said! I think the discussion should go the way that users tell how much RAM they own and what apps they use, to help others to decide how much RAM they may need. Not to make decision for others.

 

[throAU]

Oh, also... as good as macOS is with memory management, it isn't magic.

Security sandboxing, new features, etc. will still take increasing amounts of RAM, as will ever more complex web pages running massive amounts of Javascript, etc.

A single facebook tab for example in safari can easily take a gig of memory. Let's say macOS itself and various background services take 2 GB (not unreasonable these days). On an 8 GB machine that's almost half your RAM gone from a single tab in a web browser.... once the OS and associated services are running.

Going from 8 to 16 doesn't double the amount of RAM you get to use - because the OS overheads are fixed.

So instead of having say 4-5 GB free for your own use, you've got 12-13 GB of your 16 left.

i.e., you double your RAM purchase and get 2-3x the amount available for applications once "overheads" (like say a few web browser tabs, the OS, a mail client) are taken into account.

This is why currently, i'd consider 8 GB to be a lot less "value" than 16 GB. The additional outlay isn't huge, and you get a lot more than 2x the RAM available for your own use once "overheads" are taken care of.

 

[jerwin]

This is why currently, i'd consider 8 GB to be a lot less "value" than 16 GB. The additional outlay isn't huge, and you get a lot more than 2x the RAM available for your own use once "overheads" are taken care of.

Reminder: The title of this thread is "40 GB of RAM worth it?"

And it's not. A typical imac and its user will figure out how to use up to 16 GB. But beyond 16 GB? Better to have a specific use case.

 

[EugW]

currently, if you can take 4 DDR3 or DDR4 DIMMS, 32 GB is the sweet spot (where cost hasn't started increasing significantly vs. resource purchased and benefit vs. typical end user workload)

For the current Macs, the sweet spot would be either 24 GB or 40 GB, unless you must buy RAM from Apple. It's actually cheaper to buy 24 GB (8 GB Apple + 16 GB third party) than 16 GB from Apple, and it's cheaper to buy 40 GB (8 GB Apple + 32 GB third party) than 32 GB from Apple. I suspect for most, the sweet spot is actually 24 GB, and that's what I got, but in my 24 vs 40 GB thread, it seems more people have gotten 40 GB, probably because it's not enormously expensive to get 2 x 16 GB DIMMs from a third party whether they actually need it or not.

if you're limited to 2 DIMMS (e.g. laptop), 16 GB is the sweet spot.

you want either enough, or a surplus - else you're just leaving significant performance improvements on your very expensive machine on the table for minimal additional outlay relative to what you already spent.

cheap != "good value", and crippling an otherwise expensive machine like a mac with insufficient RAM severely diminishes the value you get in terms of $ vs performance

I went with 16 GB even on my Core m3 MacBook. Actually I think for most people who buy MacBooks (non-Pro), 8 GB is probably OK right now, myself included, but the key words here being "OK" and "right now". 4 GB is insufficient, and while 8 GB is sufficient for light to moderate usage on this sort of machine for most consumers in 2017, that says nothing about usage in the future, and of course doesn't factor in things like VMs and what not.

And this becomes a key decision. For the 27" iMacs it doesn't really matter that much, because you can just buy memory later. Not so with the laptops now. If you buy 8 GB, then you are stuck with 8 for the life of the machine. I predict in 4-5 years an average laptop user might want 10-12 GB, but that's impossible with current Mac laptops, so 16 GB it is.

 

[SaSaSushi]

Reminder: The title of this thread is "40 GB of RAM worth it?"

And it's not. A typical imac and its user will figure out how to use up to 16 GB. But beyond 16 GB? Better to have a specific use case.

See Post #39.

 

[ulahoa]

I originally had 16GB (8x2) of Crucial RAM on order, but later cancelled that order for 32GB (16x2) for both future-proofing reasons and expected usage.

I plan to get into hardcore video editing on FCPX, using a whole suite of different plug-ins; and from what I hear, FCPX takes up a lot of RAM. I can't speak on it personally as I am still learning and haven't done too much on the program yet, but quoting a post from 2015, someone had 24GB of RAM which was completely used up after only 1 hour of FCPX usage on the previous-gen 5K iMac (which lead to major slowing and occasional crashes for that person).

So to get rid of any possible RAM anxiety, I decided that the extra $130 upgrade would be worth it. Not to mention that I'd have the option to go to 64GB of total RAM in the future if needed.

 

[-Ryan-]

I bought my iMac 2017 with the base 8GB of RAM and purchased an additional 32GB kit from Crucial for £240 and am running 40GB. Honestly, I have absolutely no need for 40GB of RAM. My computer is used for work (mostly documents), but ultimately for me it was a matter of buying it and forgetting about it for the lifetime of the machine. I had a feeling that 8GB might eventually start to crawl.

With 40GB RAM and the SSD, I don't see myself needing to replace this Mac for 5+ years which makes it a good value in my eyes.

 

[adib]

I know a poll was done to see what RAM people would be running and many said they would buy the 32 gig kits and run 40 gigs total. Has anyone done this yet? Is it worth it to have 40 gigs?

You might want to check if the unbalanced RAM causes any CPU slowdown. Use Geekbench and compare the CPU-related metrics with balanced RAM (e.g. 16x2) and unbalanced RAM sticks (however that 40GB configuration comes from)

 

[Glideslope]

You might want to check if the unbalanced RAM causes any CPU slowdown. Use Geekbench and compare the CPU-related metrics with balanced RAM (e.g. 16x2) and unbalanced RAM sticks (however that 40GB configuration comes from)

I've wondered this myself. I sold my 2 4g Apple Micron Dimms after installing my 2 16g Crucial Dimms. I've never been comfortable with configs outside of 8, 16, 24, 32, 64, with matching DIMM size. I'd love to see CPU responses with 32g vs 40g.

 

[SaSaSushi]

I've wondered this myself. I sold my 2 4g Apple Micron Dimms after installing my 2 16g Crucial Dimms. I've never been comfortable with configs outside of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 with matching DIMM size. I'd love to see CPU responses with 32g vs 40g.

I promised to do this in the other thread but I've been too busy this week. I will definitely try it over the weekend.

My Geekbench results (posted to the other thread) are beating the baseline as is with 40GB so I'm not too worried about it. I will follow up with the results.

 

[EugW]

24 GB and 40 GB are already effectively matched RAM configurations, as long as the memory is arranged properly. And it is arranged properly if you leave the stock RAM in the original positions.

 

[Glideslope]

I promised to do this in the other thread but I've been too busy this week. I will definitely try it over the weekend.

My Geekbench results (posted to the other thread) are beating the baseline as is with 40GB so I'm not too worried about it. I will follow up with the results.

Thanks.
[doublepost=1499956074][/doublepost]

24 GB and 40 GB are already effectively matched RAM configurations, as long as the memory is arranged properly. And it is arranged properly if you leave the stock RAM in the original positions.

What makes the stock location remaining with the factory RAM critical?