Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

cMBP upgrade

D

danyull

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 9, 2013
38
0
Right now, I have 500gb HD and 4 GB RAM.

I want to upgrade my mac but I don't know which part to upgrade.

I use quite the storage and run bootcamp sometimes too. Should I get a 500GB SSD, or get a 250GB SSD and upgrade my ram to 8/16gb RAM?

Would upgrading RAM give me a noticeable improvement?
 
If you get an SSD, I'd certainly go with the 500GB; that is what I have in mine. Plus I also have 16GB of RAM and this machine screams in performance. If you can afford, both, go for it!
 
danyull said:
Right now, I have 500gb HD and 4 GB RAM.

I want to upgrade my mac but I don't know which part to upgrade.

I use quite the storage and run bootcamp sometimes too. Should I get a 500GB SSD, or get a 250GB SSD and upgrade my ram to 8/16gb RAM?

Would upgrading RAM give me a noticeable improvement?
Click to expand...

Switching to an SSD would give you the most noticeable improvement. You'll only notice more RAM if you regularly do things which require more than 4GB. Pay close attention to your Activity Monitor. Unless you're an absolute storage fiend, I would go with the latter option: 250GB SSD + 8GB of RAM. Check out the Samsung EVO line of SSDs, they are good and economical.
 
Personally I would go with the SSD first as this dramatically improves performance in so many ways. Then you can always upgrade the RAM a bit later on if you still find it slow when multitasking. You'll only notice the benefits of the RAM when multitasking heavily or running memory intensive applications.
Once you experience an SSD boot up time you don't go back!
 
danyull said:
Right now, I have 500gb HD and 4 GB RAM.

I want to upgrade my mac but I don't know which part to upgrade.

I use quite the storage and run bootcamp sometimes too. Should I get a 500GB SSD, or get a 250GB SSD and upgrade my ram to 8/16gb RAM?

Would upgrading RAM give me a noticeable improvement?
Click to expand...

The SSD will boost your performance a lot. It will be very noticeable. You can look at your activity monitor and see how much RAM you usually use. If you use a lot of RAM, then upgrading the RAM to 8GB or 16GB will help.

If 250GB is enough for your storage, I would go for the 250GB+8GB RAM route. You get the performance enhancement of both.
 
danyull said:
Right now, I have 500gb HD and 4 GB RAM.

I want to upgrade my mac but I don't know which part to upgrade.

I use quite the storage and run bootcamp sometimes too. Should I get a 500GB SSD, or get a 250GB SSD and upgrade my ram to 8/16gb RAM?

Would upgrading RAM give me a noticeable improvement?
Click to expand...

I'll make a boring car analogy.

Your question sounds like "I wonder if I should get a Ferrari or a pickup truck, what would you recommend knowing that I like strolls on the beach?" See what I mean? Not a word about what you'll use the vehicle for. Knowing you use bootcamp doesn't give much more info, you could be doing anything in Windows.

What OS are you running? What do you actually do with your computer? Why do you want to upgrade? When you feel it is too slow for your needs, what is running? What is your memory pressure (if you're on Mavericks) like at those times?

That'll help us help you.
 
snaky69 said:
I'll make a boring car analogy.

Your question sounds like "I wonder if I should get a Ferrari or a pickup truck, what would you recommend knowing that I like strolls on the beach?" See what I mean? Not a word about what you'll use the vehicle for. Knowing you use bootcamp doesn't give much more info, you could be doing anything in Windows.

What OS are you running? What do you actually do with your computer? Why do you want to upgrade? When you feel it is too slow for your needs, what is running? What is your memory pressure (if you're on Mavericks) like at those times?

That'll help us help you.
Click to expand...

Im running Mavericks/Win 8.1. I don't do too much intensive work, but my mac boots slow as hell and when it does boot, it takes a while to load an application. I'm gonna end up getting the 500GB SSD and upgrade ram at a later point. I just need help with the ram now. Is the one I linked good?
 
danyull said:
Im running Mavericks/Win 8.1. I don't do too much intensive work, but my mac boots slow as hell and when it does boot, it takes a while to load an application. I'm gonna end up getting the 500GB SSD and upgrade ram at a later point. I just need help with the ram now. Is the one I linked good?
Click to expand...

Corsair makes great RAM with a great warranty. Shop around, newegg may have it for a bit less than Amazon.
 
I have the 16 GB Vengeance kit and the Samsung 840 EVO in my MBP. I have no complaints about performance - it boots in less than 30 seconds, my 20+ GB iPhoto library launches in 4 seconds, it can run multiple VMs simultaneously without issue. The boot and iPhoto times were most improved with the SSD upgrade while the VM was helped most with the RAM upgrade.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back