Mac Pro - How Much RAM do YOU have?

I have a measly 2 gigs... which is fine until I start doing anything of purpose in PS, when it slows down horrendously. Aperture and PS is out of the the question.

Now I come to a question: iPhone, IRA, RAM, or 32" TV/monitor?

I currently have 3GB, however another 2GB will be landing on my doorstep today. I've found with the usage I'm putting the system under when running Aperture + others apps page outs are tremendous. Hopefully the extra 2GB will top out the issue.

I have 4GB of RAM in the Mac Pro. It runs OS X Server so needs to look after everyone else who's logged in as well as me. Processor power isn't an issue, there's just heaps on the Mac Pro, but at 2GB of RAM I was getting paging that was driving me nuts.

It's all Apple RAM. I've never been able to observe a single error from any of the 8 sticks and the system is incredibly stable. Only gets restarted for updates, is on 24x7.

TheSpaz said:

You know, you don't really NEED Apple RAM. Apple's RAM is just as good as other RAM as long as you make sure it matches Apple's specs and includes the giant heat syncs. Apple RAM is WICKED expensive!

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I didn't say I needed Apple RAM, but it was a conscious choice.

5 gigs of RAM.


Currenlty after 5 days uptime, I have 2.7 million page ins, 0 page outs.

I'm currently running 10GBs.

When I got the machine I quickly upgraded to 4GBs then to 6 a month or so after that. With my heavy usage of running lots of the heavy hitting apps at the same time I soon realised that to accomodate my usage that I needed more so I bit the bullet and got 2x 2GB modules to take me to 10Gbs (so now all my slots are full )

it runs well now with a much better page ins/outs ratio and far less waiting around, I quite often still manage to get it to less than 500MBs of RAM remaining though so someday I may well add some more but for the forseeable future 10 seems about spot on.

I got my RAM from Crucial, I've bought 2x 1GBs from them and 2x 2GBs

For those who bought third party RAM recently, can you tell us the amount of RAM purchased, what configuration (1x1GB, etc.), purchased from whom, and how much you paid.

Thanks

Sean Dempsey said:

5 gigs of RAM.


Currenlty after 5 days uptime, I have 2.7 million page ins, 0 page outs.

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Sean NOW thats some damn impressive ins/outs even with 10GBs I never have 0!

4gb

paulinbognor said:

Sean NOW thats some damn impressive ins/outs even with 10GBs I never have 0!

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I have found that running disk utility - repair permissions free's up inactive ram as seen in activity monitor. after this, you will have more available so there will be less page outs.

dont know why it does this.. anyone have a clue??

aussie_geek

You should make this into a poll. BTW I have 4G, I've used almost all of it, but so far have found no reason for more.

paulinbognor said:

Sean NOW thats some damn impressive ins/outs even with 10GBs I never have 0!

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The life of low-res Web Dev. My files are so small I never really need any disk. I am sure if I had some video editing or other large-file stuff going on, I wouldn't be able to push it as far.

5 Gig here. Haven't had a single page out yet.

9GB

~Crawn

I have 6GB.

My Mac Pro has only been up 1 day, 8 hours (got back from vacation late Saturday evening) and have had 726,525 page ins and 2934 page outs.

2GB, tho with Aperture it really starts to page-out. I've moved the library to a RAID 0 recently (with extensive backups) which has helped with performance a lot, however a RAM upgrade is the next on the cards.

aussie_geek said:

I have found that running disk utility - repair permissions free's up inactive ram as seen in activity monitor. after this, you will have more available so there will be less page outs.

dont know why it does this.. anyone have a clue??

aussie_geek

Click to expand...

Freeing up inactive RAM is actually a bad idea. Inactive RAM is things like disk caches and the like. When calculating your free available RAM you should add the inactive RAM to the free RAM to get the total available RAM for allocation.

Any inactive RAM can be used by any application wanting RAM. However if an app goes for a disk read and this info is currently held in the inactive RAM then it will be read from there.

Inactive RAM is actually a good thing.

3gb, added 2 1gb +stock

Crawn2003 said:

9GB

~Crawn

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Same. 1GB is Factory (512x2) and 4x2GB from OWC

3 gigs, made a huge difference in World of Warcraft!

I Have 5GB In The Quad 2.66 Mac Pro, 6GB In The Quad G5, 2GB In 1.25GHz PBG4

I got my MP with 5GB, but the sticks were installed in the wrong way hampering maximum performance. My 512 sticks had been left in the back of Riser A instead of moved to the front so that the two pair of 1GB sticks could gain 256bit addressing by both being in the back of each riser.

If I were to add 4GB more without losing any of what I have, I would want to move the pair of 1GB sticks to the front of the Bottom Riser B and add the two 2GB sticks to the rear of the Upper Riser A.

Adding 4 more - really 3 more - I would lose the 512 sticks, move a pair of 1GB sticks from the rear of the lower riser B to the front of upper riser A and add the two 2GB sticks to the rear of lower riser B.

Here's the Mac Pro Memory Configuration Chart that shows everyone the correct way to put all combinations of sizes of sticks together for maximum performance in case you put yours in the wrong way too: