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2009 Mac mini; stock 1Gb stick + 2Gb crucial stick

glossywhite

glossywhite

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Just wanted to know guys... I have just ordered a 2Gb crucial DDR3 sodimm for my base model 2009 Mac mini. Am I to expect DRASTICALLY lower performance, than if I had used two of these 2Gb sticks?. The nature of the internet beast, is that one often doesn't know which story to believe, and let's face it - people often have a propensity to exaggerate a little, when it's simply a matter of nanoseconds that causes the perfomance 'debates'.

Being quite tight for cash, I am simply upgrading my Mac mini, one 2Gb stick at a time. The next stick will arrive next week, and then, once money is back to normal, I'll order myself a nice WD scorpio black edition drive 🙂.

Real life experience from people who have the same configuration would be helpful.

Thanks folks.
 
glossywhite said:
Just wanted to know guys... I have just ordered a 2Gb crucial DDR3 sodimm for my base model 2009 Mac mini. Am I to expect DRASTICALLY lower performance, than if I had used two of these 2Gb sticks?. The nature of the internet beast, is that one often doesn't know which story to believe, and let's face it - people often have a propensity to exaggerate a little, when it's simply a matter of nanoseconds that causes the perfomance 'debates'.

Being quite tight for cash, I am simply upgrading my Mac mini, one 2Gb stick at a time. The next stick will arrive next week, and then, once money is back to normal, I'll order myself a nice WD scorpio black edition drive 🙂.

Real life experience from people who have the same configuration would be helpful.

Thanks folks.
Click to expand...

the dual piping will be disabled with the different size memory, I hope when you purchase your second GB it the same type, so the dual piping should re-enable itself. It not too much of a performance hit though.
 
you won't get much of a performance hit, 3GB is much better than 1GB so you will feel the difference. But Dual Channel memory will not be enabled, this means that e.g your ram module has a core clock of 333MHz. if you had two identical ram modules dual channel would kick in and double both ram modules to 667MHz. So in theory you still have the same amount of ram but it just runs faster.
 
worst case is you may have compatibility problems. theoretically all memory of a type is the same, but i've seen problems with two brands of memory in a computer at the same time. sometimes they don't want to play nice together.
 
Only $40 to update to 4gig via apple. Really!
In the uk we have to pay £120 via apple when purchasing the mini to get the fill 4GB.
 
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