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Abazigal

Contributor
Original poster
Jul 18, 2011
19,455
21,842
Singapore
Hi all,

My imac currently has 8gb of ram, and I am wondering if there is any benefit to increasing this to 12 or even 16gb? Will it help my programs run or load faster in any way? I have tried researching online, general consensus seems to be that it only helps with multitasking, but I can't find any authorative source on this.

It currently has the stock 1tb HDD, but I am not confident enough to swap in a SSD myself, nor do I know anyone who can do it, so said option may not be viable as of the moment, cognizant as I am to the benefits.

I am not really a power user in the sense. Mostly light tasks like surfing, word processing, gaming (on window7 boot camp), though I may run imovie from time to time. I do however, like to keep a lot of windows and programs open and running in the background.

Thank you all for your advice in this matter. :)
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,541
942
Hi all,

My imac currently has 8gb of ram, and I am wondering if there is any benefit to increasing this to 12 or even 16gb?
To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
 
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