No it won't. This is a common misconception. More RAM does not equal faster. It's more like a gas tank. A bigger gas tank won't make your car go faster just allow it to go farther without having to stop.
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8 gig vs 16 gig in a Mini 2012 2.3 i7?
- Thread starter Vincenzok
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Mike in Kansas
macrumors 6502a
It will only speed it up if you are constantly paging out to disk. And if your disk is an SSD, you won't notice page outs anyway near as much than if the disk is an HDD. You can check Activity Monitor for that.
Having said that, over the years I have seen OSX and the apps I run (primarily Aperture) require more RAM as they become more complex and the base Macs come with more standard RAM. So even though getting 16GB over 8GB won't necessarily speed it up (unless you are paging out like I stated above), for a difference of a few Starbucks Venti Latte's per paulrbeers eariler post, I'd go for it.
philipma1957
macrumors 604
I use 2 passenger car vs 4 passenger car.
they are equally fast at 2 passengers but if you need to move 4 the 4 passenger will do it in one trip. the 2 passenger need to make 2 trips..
look at my thumbnail. my ram is 8gb so I have a 2 passenger car.
but my page outs are 0 my swap used is 0.
this means my car never needed to carry 3 passenger's so it was never slowed. this is really a money question.
this is the fastest biggest ram that works in a mini this kingston plug n play 16gb kit 1600MHz speed.
no ram is bigger
no ram is faster
no ram is better. it also cost more the best price today is the superbiiz with the 15% off.
Is it really worth the extra money? My opinion is I don't own any. I won't buy it at the price. I buy any working 16gb ram from a good company at a good price if I know that mini is a mini that needs 16gb ram. the mini I am typing on never goes past 8gb so it has 8gb. but I mod and upgrade a lot of minis.
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104317
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Tech...59732315&sr=8-2&keywords=kingston+plug+n+play
https://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=D31600S16G 15% off with code 'Harbow' best price for today
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this is the fastest 8gb ram it is kingston plug n play. it is what is in this mini. if you don't run vmware fusion or parallels if you have a dual core 2012 mini i really like this ram. I push it on my customers as my first choice.
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104257
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Modu...2369&sr=1-1&keywords=kingston+plug+n+play+8gb
https://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=D31600S8GX 15% off with code 'Harbowl' best price for today
crucial is good
gskill is good
patriot is good
geil is good
pny is good
corsair is good
all of these work much more often then not.
when in doubt buy from amazon as they take a return with the simple statement defective doe not work in my machine
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Either or. The point simply being, blanket statements like "it will make your computer faster if you add more RAM" is exactly what they tell you at places like Best Buy. My parents would never use more than 4GB (at least not while our OS's are using 2GB or less), so it wouldn't make a hill of beans difference.
philipma1957
macrumors 604
If you are only occasionally seeing beachballs and you don't have an SSD, then I would say you are almost certainly waiting on your hard drive and adding more memory probably won't make anything noticeably faster.
Don't bother upgrading your RAM at all. Instead spend the money on an SSD and an external USB 3 enclosure and boot off of that. It should cost around $120 total and give you a very noticeable performance improvement.
Conventional wisdom on this forum is that you should always max out your RAM because it's only $50. But there are a million things you can buy for $50. Just because something costs $50 doesn't mean you should buy it.
Personally I have 4GB in my new Mini and have several memory-hungry programs open all the time and have no need to upgrade. I rarely see any significant page-ins/page-outs. I am constantly using XCode, Photoshop, and a Windows VM, in addition to the usual web browser, Mail.app, iTunes, and other random smaller things. Everything works fine. Only upgrade stuff when you have to.
16 GB Corsair Vengence from Amazon for less than $100. Running in my mini 2012. Helpful for having my VM open along with other apps
Times have changed. When I was a kid and had a computer with 1 MB of RAM, I saved my allowance for months to get 4 MB of RAM and it was a night and day difference. When I had a PC in college with 16 MB of RAM, I saved my money again to buy 32 MB and then 64 MB, and it again made an enormous difference.
But hardware has dramatically outpaced software and I bet that most "normal" people doing most "normal" things wouldn't notice at all if you doubled their RAM and didn't tell them.
Running a bunch of VMs is a big exception though.
Please show us these benchmarks that prove MORE RAM = better performance. That is ONLY true if you do not have sufficient RAM to begin with. If you are using a Mini to surf the internet, then adding more RAM won't make it run any faster since the 2GB of free RAM (roughly 2 lost for OS + GPU) is more than plenty. I'm not saying someone shouldn't upgrade, but to make blanket statement that "more ram = faster computer" is (as I previously stated) what places like Best Buy use to get people to buy the "bigger computer".... If you aren't maxing out your RAM, then there is no performance increase if you add more RAM. As phillipma pointed out, his Mini isn't maxing 8GB, so going to 16GB isn't going to make any difference.
Show me benchmarks that disprove my above statements please.
sauria
macrumors 6502
Did you read the link you're quoting? It's talking about working with images that are 20k pixels wide. If they're also 20k pixels tall then you're talking about 400 MEGAPIXEL images. This is basically just an artificial test created to test the hypothetical situation of running out of physical memory. It has nothing to do with whether or not regular people would benefit from more RAM.
Mike in Kansas
macrumors 6502a
You do realize that you have just proven what paulrbeers stated: you'll only see a difference in speed IF you don't have enough RAM to begin with. Lloyd Chambers was opening images that create 16GB and 54GB files on systems with 8GB, 16GB and 32GB of RAM. Of course the larger RAM will go faster, as it is paging less to disk when the files are opened.
Repeat the same test with an image that creates a 2GB file and then see what the speed differences are. I'll tell you - there won't be any.
And be careful when quoting things from this site - hardly any of it is real world. Have you ever read this guy's setups? He loves creating the biggest, fastest, most expensive systems and then putting down everybody else's. He's nuts...
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sauria
macrumors 6502
You can also do a little research on xlr8yourmac.com and barefeats.com. Every Mac I've used performed better when I upgraded the RAM, no exceptions.
Ummm, did you even read my post? I'll quote myself to you:
Please show us these benchmarks that prove MORE RAM = better performance. That is ONLY true if you do not have sufficient RAM to begin with.
The benchmark you provided is EXACTLY that. The person is using an image that is rediculously large and therefore is limited by RAM.
Have you ever looked at a hardware review site? Did you know that most of their benchmarks are run on Systems that use 8GB of RAM or less? You know why? Because in the end (unless you are RAM limited), having more RAM does not equate to a faster system.....
Mike in Kansas
macrumors 6502a
I've done plenty of research and there is a point of diminishing returns. Oh sure, you can keep adding RAM to ensure that you can concurrently run Photoshop, Final Cut, Aperture, iTunes, a few VM's, 50 browser windows using Flash, Mail, streaming video, compile some code, etc etc etc - but that is just a banal exercise to prove a point. It's not a real world experience.
Some people use more RAM than other people. I don't have enough information about what you do with your computer to argue that you haven't or wouldn't benefit from having more RAM, but as a computer professional who's been using Macs for the last 4+ years with all sorts of RAM configurations I can say with some confidence that even 2GB is enough for most "normal" users and I wouldn't recommend that they upgrade. (If anything, any upgrade money is MUCH better spent on an SSD.)
To know if you would benefit from more RAM you would have to have Activity Monitor up and be carefully monitoring the number of page ins/outs while doing the activities that stress your setup. Unless you do that, it's baseless to claim that you would benefit from having more RAM.
sauria
macrumors 6502
Mike in Kansas
macrumors 6502a
Oh. Ouch. Throw Microsoft insults at me, and taunt me with my ability to only use 3GB of RAM. How mature. Next you'll be telling me to go use my BlackBerry...
You made a blanket statement, then backed it up with a straw argument that 99% of the computing population will never experience and are trying to make it sound like gospel. Maybe you and Lloyd are drinking buddies, I don't know.
What's your point here? What does this have to do with anything? Low memory usage? I work every day in Windows 7 32bit which means I'm limited to about 3.3GB of usable Memory (not my choice, but it's what the company I work for gave me).
This was a completely silly and juvenile comment to make. At some point, you need to realize you made a blanket statement that just does not hold up and you need to accept that move along. The more you post things like this, the worse it will be for you. We are tryign to educate you so either accept this as a learning oppurtunity or just drop it all together.
Giuly
macrumors 68040
As far as the timing of the 1333MHz RAM Apple supplied with it's machines (and the Crucial kits) goes, I calculated a while ago a 20.8% faster bandwidth of the 1600MHz CL9 Kingston HyperX Plug'n'Play. But 1600MHz CL11 is about as fast as 1333MHz CL9, which in turn is about as fast as 1066MHz CL7 (which, coincidently, are the specifications Apple installed in the recent years).
Luckily, we're able to install Kingston RAM.
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Yes, but as I stated then the difference between bandwidth and real world difference (i.e. how much faster does a video encode, frames per second in a game, etc) is negligible. I proved that by providing my own benchmarks. I ran benchmarks on my brand new quad core mini with 4GB of RAM at 1600mhz vs 16GB of 1333mhz and the 1333mhz RAM was almost as fast as the 1600mhz. Video benchmarks were a hair faster, as was the memory bandwidth (obviously), but for handbrake the difference was a second or two (well within a magin of error). So again, the overall system speed is barely affected by faster RAM.
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Giuly
macrumors 68040
My apologies, you are right. However, it has been proven time and time again that faster RAM barely makes a difference in modern computers.
here was anandtech's review comparing various speeds of RAM on Ivy Bridge using integrated graphics....
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/...333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill
It directly compares 1333mhz CL9 to 1600mhz CL9 and the difference in most benchmarks was negligible. Basically memory bandwidth only affects overall system performance by very small margins.... The largest difference between 1333mhz vs 1600mhz CL9 was about 9%. These are all run on the IGP which would be the most affected by memory bandwidth.
In day to day non-gaming situations, the memory bandwidth matters even less.
EDIT: I realize that the link above was for desktop RAM. It really wouldn't matter either way since we can't use anything better than 1600mhz CL9 in Mac Mini's.
thekev
macrumors 604
Nooo....... the gas tank is the battery found in notebooks or the power supply here. The timings are obviously timing belts. So if you wanted to give your mac pro better traction, would you go with michelin or pirelli tires😛?
I think the only thing driving that is the rise of integrated graphics chips. Even then small differences in memory clock speeds are probably not noticeable.