Too much ram and speed in a Mac Pro????

[deedoodat]

Shurely, there can never be too much ram, but the technical director at my work has been told to take out 6 of the 8gig of ram he bought for our Final Cut Pro, 3gHz intel machine as Apple have screwed up and more than 2gig's can't be supported by the motherboard! (?)

I've heard from others that FCP will only use 2gig's at most so I'm wondering if it's this fact that's been blown out of proportion and 8gig would work fine in the MBP. Can anybody out there shed some light? I'd trust you lot more than our re-sellers!

Also, I'm gagging to buy a FCP setup myself and read with interest about the 3gHz machine being not much faster than the 2.xgHz one. Is anyone running FCP on the 'lighter' cpu's? Does everything work just fine?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[ljones]

Not sure about cutting the ram down. i highly doubt Apple would design a system not to take advantage of the ram. FCP didn't use a ton of my 3 gigs of ram, so i'm not sure about that one. It ran fine, no problems. I'm still in need for more speed, i never want to wait to render anything out. So a 10 second wait is too long when you are a power user. But... considering how long projects in FCP 1 took on my G4 wayyyyy back in college, i really can' complain.

 

[xper]

You can't get enough of ram, even if FCP only uses 2.5-4gig of ram, the rest of the memory can be used in other programs running at the same time as FCP

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93844

 

[rgomez]

Shurely, there can never be too much ram, but the technical director at my work has been told to take out 6 of the 8gig of ram he bought for our Final Cut Pro, 3gHz intel machine as Apple have screwed up and more than 2gig's can't be supported by the motherboard! (?)

That's a lie. The motherboard can support up to 16Gb. I have 3 Gb and another 2 comming, and they can and are used by the Mac when it needs them. Now, if the technical director doesn't want the extra RAM, I can pass you my address

I've heard from others that FCP will only use 2gig's at most so I'm wondering if it's this fact that's been blown out of proportion and 8gig would work fine in the MBP. Can anybody out there shed some light? I'd trust you lot more than our re-sellers!

I'm not sure here. I would expect FCP to use the memory available if it needs it, but I don't know. At least in the Windows world, 32bit apps usually are limited to 2Gb of address space, but there are tricks that can make them access any memory needed. I would expect that in Mac OS X there stuff like that too.

edit: It seems that FCP only uses up to 4Gb, per the link above. I guess you'll have to wait for Leopard and FCP 6 to have more than 4Gb. But, as others have said, you can use the other memory to other Apps running at the same time.

Also, I'm gagging to buy a FCP setup myself and read with interest about the 3gHz machine being not much faster than the 2.xgHz one. Is anyone running FCP on the 'lighter' cpu's? Does everything work just fine?

I have a 2.66 and it screams. I believe you will be better saving the money in the processor update and buying RAM instead, or more hard disks.

Good luck!

 

[petite]

My Mac Pro has 4GB at this moment. I benchmarked it with Photoshop with 512MB - 5GB and found out that 5GB made Photoshop slower. This did support what I had heard about Photoshop having issues with more than 4GB. But this is a bug! I am keeping the extra 1GB until Leopard and CS3 arrives because it will come handy then.

With other programs than Photoshop... Well, I don't think they'll slow down with more RAM. FCP and Aperture are definately faster now than when I had the 512MB or 1GB. But they won't be any faster with 16GB than with 4GB. Until Leopard of course - just like rgomez said. Isn't this because the 64bits aren't implemended in the GUI right now so no programs are actually using yet ?!?

 

[ChrisA]

Even if FCP limits the amount of RAM it will use the other RAm is used by Mac OSX for other things, like for example a disk cache. An then of course there is the kernal and all the other process that you can't do without.

It's a good thing "vodoo enginerring" is limited to computers and not used for roads, dams and bridges.

 

[petite]

Even if FCP limits the amount of RAM it will use the other RAm is used by Mac OSX for other things, like for example a disk cache. An then of course there is the kernal and all the other process that you can't do without.

That sounds logical

 

[MacBoobsPro]

Your techincal director is an ass!

 

[deedoodat]

.

 

[nihilisticmonk]

Shurely, there can never be too much ram, but the technical director at my work has been told to take out 6 of the 8gig of ram he bought for our Final Cut Pro, 3gHz intel machine as Apple have screwed up and more than 2gig's can't be supported by the motherboard! (?)

I've heard from others that FCP will only use 2gig's at most so I'm wondering if it's this fact that's been blown out of proportion and 8gig would work fine in the MBP. Can anybody out there shed some light? I'd trust you lot more than our re-sellers!

Also, I'm gagging to buy a FCP setup myself and read with interest about the 3gHz machine being not much faster than the 2.xgHz one. Is anyone running FCP on the 'lighter' cpu's? Does everything work just fine?

Thanks for your thoughts.

Hmmm,

What they may be talking about is the "quad channel" advantage which is praised highly by members of this board.

Basically, you have 2 cpu's with 2 cores each, meaning 4 logical cores.

The mac pro works at full memory bandwidth with 4 dimms, (1 per cpu), apparently this doubles the access speed of the memory (or something, I can't remember)

If you use more than 4 dimms, then you get more memory, but it's accessed at half the speed.

Actual real world benchmarks on how this effects perforance is non-existant, as is real world proof that this fact is true, but the macrumors board states it, so it must be true

Any complaints = search the forum and contact the people that posted the original threads

 

[Rare]

The "Quad Channel" advantage is only about a 5% increase, if that, in speed. It is better to have more RAM than have 5% faster RAM if you are using high demand programs such as FCP. FB-DIMMS totally kill RAM latency, it takes upto 45% longer to access data than with standard DDR-II.

 

[milozauckerman]

If you use more than 4 dimms, then you get more memory, but it's accessed at half the speed.

Um.... No.