Planning to buy a MB

[baustromverteil]

Hey there ...

seems here's a bunch of knowledge on macs and when it's best to buy what mac

so, as the apple store offers a great deal for students (MP+IPOD) I'm thinking about selling my iBook 1,2 GHz on ebay as long I get more than 400 Euros for it and buy a MB ...

I think the 512 MB of ram are not enough, but i refuse to pay an extra of 94 € to apple for upgrading it to 1 gig ... I strolled around some onlinestores and found 1 GB Kingston RAM running on 667 MHz for about 90 Euros, now my question is: is there any decrease in performance if the two RAM banks aren't equipped equally? Would it be wiser to upgrade the MB with 2x512 MB like apple does it? Would be great if someone could give me advise ...

one last question: what about games and the shared graphics memory? I'm not the kind of hardcore gamer, but sometimes I'd like to play games like simcity 2000 or maybe max payne occasionally on the MB ... how's the performance?

cheers, Max

 

[miles01110]

It doesn't make a huge difference if the RAM slots arent symmetric. if you buy a 1 GB stick, the extra memory will more than likely outweigh the benefits of having symmetric slots.

Simcity 2000, IF it even runs on the mac (that's a really old game) will be fine. Max Payne will also be fine.

 

[MrCrowbar]

Buy 1 GB sticks on eBay. That's where I got mine for a killer price. You won't notice any performance loss when the slots are not equally equipped. On the Mac Pros you do, not on the consumer mashines or the Macbook Pro.

Games run fine. I played Half Life 2 under windows on the 2GHz Macbook and it wasn't bad at all. Looked pretty much like my laptop with a AMD Athlon 2600+ and an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600.