Best way to test the difference between 2GB and 4GB RAM

[iNotion]

I just got my 24” iMac 2.8Ghz last week and yesterday, I upgraded my RAM to 4GB RAM 800MHz SODIMM Kingston(2 slots of 2Ghz) from the stock 2GB RAM. Right after that, I restart my Mac and Mac recognizes my 4GB RAM input. But comparing speed between both is not much of a difference, specially boot up, or watching movie.
I haven't start off with works of photo editing.(the reason i got a Mac)
Can anyone here know what is the best way to know the speed difference or any difference?

 

[gehrbox]

I just got my 24” iMac 2.8Ghz last week and yesterday, I upgraded my RAM to 4GB RAM 800MHz SODIMM Kingston(2 slots of 2Ghz) from the stock 2GB RAM. Right after that, I restart my Mac and Mac recognizes my 4GB RAM input. But comparing speed between both is not much of a difference, specially boot up, or watching movie.
I haven't start off with works of photo editing.(the reason i got a Mac)
Can anyone here know what is the best way to know the speed difference or any difference?

Going from 2GB of ram to 4GB does not add speed unless you are using most of the ram. If you are not running apps that make use of the extra memory you will only see a speed improvement in app and document launch times because OS X caches recently accessed HDD files.

If all you are doing is playing movies, surfing the web and MS office type apps you will not see any improvement over 2GB. If you edit LARGE images you will see an improvement. If you are running VM's you will see a big improvement. There are apps that crave memory and if you are not using them or not running a bunch of processes at one time you will not see much improvement with the extra 2GB of ram. The system WILL use more for caching then when you had 2Gb, but speed is not going to see a big bump from regular office type apps.

 

[Mark-Mac-Attack]

what were you expecting, the film you were watching to run at double speed?

 

[fhall1]

Load up VMWare Fusion and create a virtual windows machine running Vista Ultimate. Give it 1.5G of RAM and run it with 2G RAM in your system, then repeat with 4G in your system - you'll see the difference.

 

[iNotion]

i am currently playing around with Googles Sketchup.
Quite a fun 3D software and it's free.
So it is Photoshop + Sketchup + Illustrator...
So far. So Gooooood!!!

 

[NintendoFan]

Open up a ton of programs and use them.

 

[CEnTR4L]

is there a benchmark test to do so, I'm really getting concerned since iDVD won't work properly (very slow when preview project)
I'm getting the idea that I bought a bogus RAM brand/quality.... ughhh

 

[iMacmatician]

I just got my 24” iMac 2.8Ghz last week and yesterday, I upgraded my RAM to 4GB RAM 800MHz SODIMM Kingston(2 slots of 2Ghz) from the stock 2GB RAM. Right after that, I restart my Mac and Mac recognizes my 4GB RAM input. But comparing speed between both is not much of a difference, specially boot up, or watching movie.
I haven't start off with works of photo editing.(the reason i got a Mac)
Can anyone here know what is the best way to know the speed difference or any difference?

Run equivalent tasks with 2 GB and with 4 GB.

You can also look for disk activity when not opening files/applications etc. That kind of disk activity is virtual memory being used (I think) and that'll slow you down a lot. It happens especially when switching between applications.