Well, I think I'm ordering a 17 inch iMac w/ intel..but...

[dylangurl21]

I have some questions.

First, I'm upgrading to 250 gb harddrive, but what about ram?

should I make the one 512 stick a 1 gb stick for 90 and then add my own additional ram?

Or should I stick with the 512 and end up with 1.5 gb total after adding my own stick? will it make that much of a difference?

thanks.

 

[ieani]

Go with 1.5GB, more RAM is always better if you can afford it.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Order the machine with the stock RAM and add third party RAM yourself. If you are in the US, DMS and Crucial both have RAM listed, for about US$108 and US$130 respectively, as opposed to the $200 per Gb Apple is charging.

Add a 1 Gb for $108 and you'll have 1.5 Gb, which is healthy.

Also, consider going with the stock 160 drive, and putting the $75 toward an external Firewire drive -- this will give you something to back up your data to, and an alternative boot drive if you ever have problems with your OS or internal drive.

Thanks,
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[FFTT]

Trevor is absolutely on the money with his advice here.

Buy your iMac 17" or the 20" (with the 256MB VRAM upgrade) and maybe iWork or MS Office and buy everything else 3rd party.

 

[dylangurl21]

well, i will for sure be putting a 1gb 3rd party stick in. my question is whether it is worth it to spend the 90 from apple to go from the 512 to a 1gb stick and have 2 gbs right away or just the 512 and the extra 1 gb for 1.5 gb. will the extra 512 make a real difference?

 

[Zman5225]

I think 1.5gb would be fine for almost everything you could do for a while. A good while. I would just order the 512mb from apple as is...then buy your 1gb aftermarket like Trevor said. Later if you decide you want to go up to 2gb, then you can always sell that 512mb, and use it towards the new 1gb purchase, taking you up to 2gb total. I think you'll be happy with 1.5gb though. My gaming machine only uses 1gb and its fine for everything that I can throw at it.

Jack