I've been looking to upgrade the RAM on my iMac to 8GB and the cheapest price I could find for a 4GB stick was $250. That's not exactly cheap by my standards for just a simple stick of RAM although blows Apple's absolutely ridiculous price of $1000. Do you think the upgrade would be worth it at all, and what kind of benefits would I see (if any)?
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Worth upgrading to 8GB of RAM on my iMac?
- Thread starter greg400
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You could always get one stick now and run with 6GB for a while...you take a small speed hit with the non-matched RAM pair, but if you're doing VMs, that's probably a small hit compared to the gain you'll get by having that much more RAM per VM and for the host OS.
Plus it's only a $250 hit to the wallet instead of $500....then when prices come down you can get the other 4GB stick.
Plus it's only a $250 hit to the wallet instead of $500....then when prices come down you can get the other 4GB stick.
Works just fine for my at 4 GB with very few Page Outs on my Macbook.
I have 6 GB on my AMD box but then again those are 4 slots of DIMMs.
I bumped up to 8GB about a week after getting my 3.06 ATiMac. Quite the noticeable difference throughout the entire computer vs the stock 4GB. I especially notice more response in loading times and overall snappiness of the usual suspects like iTunes, iWork and the like. Also games look even crisper and in fact a couple of games that used to auto detect to medium video settings flipped to high after the increase. In summary it's been my experience that if you have the money to bump your RAM in that iMac to 8GB do it and you won't be sorry you did.
What will you be using it for?
Given that the cost, net, would be $800 or so (per my findings from a few weeks ago), it would benefit Photoshop and maybe AfterEffects, but not much else... I opted to get a Mac Pro and sell off the iMac instead.
What are the specs you found (for example: DDR2, DDR3)? $250 for a 4GB SO-DIMM notebook class RAM module is VERY cheap. Not to mention DDR3 being more expensive to begin with...
Thanks for the info!
Yeah, RAM is swallowed up for having to run Winbloat in an emulated box... I did find VMWare Fusion to be better tan VirtualBox, but that's another argument...
CPU time is another factor; a dual-core system will only go so far, effectively. And if you're doing tasks in both, the speed would be so slow, a valium-snorting turtle eating ice cubes in a freezer would be going at a faster speed.
If you do adobe photo editing, after effects and use final cut pro etc. Then it would really show when coming down to speed, but I personally think the 4GB RAM sticks are ridiculously over priced, I mean you could buy a computer for one of those $1000 rip offs
Quad core over RAM there.If you do adobe photo editing, after effects and use final cut pro etc. Then it would really show when coming down to speed, but I personally think the 4GB RAM sticks are ridiculously over priced, I mean you could buy a computer for one of those $1000 rip offs
Prices are high due to the memory density needed to meet the SO-DIMM form factor.
which memory do we need to do this?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E&N=2010170381 1052910525 1309139889&name=4GB
Type : 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
is that right?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...E&N=2010170381 1052910525 1309139889&name=4GB
Type : 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
is that right?