Anyone have 6 or 8GB of ram in their iMac(Current Gen)

[pilotkid]

I tried searching!
Does anyone have and notice a difference having 6 or 8GB of ram vs the stock 4gb doing basic stuff? By basic stuff I mean email, iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, Safari, etc, etc... I'm thinking about upgrading my iMac to 8GB eventually, I know its expensive so I'd do it one stick at a time. I'm just wondering if its worth it. Via iStat I'm seeing that I'm constantly running down to less than 500mbs of free ram, sometimes much lower and my system starts to bog down. I dont do any "heavy" stuff on my iMac but I do have lots of programs open at the same time. Yes, I could close them and save myself money on the ram. I know this.
Thanks All!

EDIT: Just realized in the title I put current gen...If I recall the is the only gen that supports 6 or 8gb of ram so my bad.

 

[jameskohn]

8Gb in new iMac

I have 8Gb in my new iMac, and I can't see any difference whatsoever in performance vs. my previous generation iMac with 4Gb. I have everything open all the time, and the "heaviest" thing I do is some AVCHD video editing/rendering. If I had it to do all over again, I would have stayed with my 4Gb iMac.

 

[AlexisV]

500 megs of 'free RAM' doesn't mean you're using 3.5 gigs necessarily. Activity Monitor will give you a clearer picture.

 

[pilotkid]

Alright thanks for your replies guys! I'll check out activity moniter also.

 

[zmttoxics]

Free RAM is a non issue. You want to check to see if the system is swapping in and out tons of data. If you reboot, open the activity monitor then start your normal tasks, you should be able to see it. I would consider it bad if you have swapped gigs of data out (in is OK, its the OUT thats bad, means its active data being swapped) with in 10 minutes. If you see gigs with in an hour or 2, then its not as bad. Since you are seeing Free RAM, I don't think it would be swapping, so an upgrade wouldn't be of help to you.

 

[pilotkid]

Ok. This might be a dumb question but do you think any of this will change with Snow Leopard? Would I see a difference with more ram with that OS since its more of a "behind the scenes" update?

 

[zmttoxics]

Ok. This might be a dumb question but do you think any of this will change with Snow Leopard? Would I see a difference with more ram with that OS since its more of a "behind the scenes" update?

It will probably change. In fact the minimum ram requirements went UP, which isn't normally a good thing.