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VeganBryan

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 25, 2006
58
0
from what i understand, it's best to have RAM installed in matched pairs (2x256, 2x512, etc.), but is it really bad to have unmatched pairs? i ask, because i am probably going to be buying a refurbished rev. a macbook that comes with the stock 2x256 RAM, and i want to upgrade it. my dilemna is that i can't really afford to upgrade it to the full 2GB all at once, and i don't want to do an upgrade to 2x512 because then i'll be wasting even more RAM once i upgrade to 2x1024. so what i'd like to do, if it wouldn't be extremely detrimental, is buy one single 1024 stick at a time, giving me 1.25GB for a while, until i eventually upgrade the other stick and have 2GB. so, would it be bad to do this?
 

VeganBryan

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 25, 2006
58
0
oh so you're saying for like WORKING with graphics, right? don't think i'll be doing much of that, other than some very light photo editing in iphoto or messing with imovie.
 

richard4339

macrumors 6502a
Sep 6, 2006
896
112
Illinois
I'll preface this with the note that I am still a fairly new Mac user.

My MBP had the stock 512MB of RAM with 1 DIMM. I added a second DIMM that was 256, and the computer appeared to run slightly slower and things appeared to hang more.

Upgraded to the C2D MBP, and had the stock 1DIMMx1GB. Added the same second stick of 256, and it appeared to slow slightly, but still worked better overall than the single 1DIMM with 1gig of memory.

These are simply my observations.
 

bearbo

macrumors 68000
Jul 20, 2006
1,858
0
Upgraded to the C2D MBP, and had the stock 1DIMMx1GB. Added the same second stick of 256, and it appeared to slow slightly, but still worked better overall than the single 1DIMM with 1gig of memory.

slower than 1gb, but run better?
 
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