Added RAM to Mac Pro

[miniConvert]

To say I'd been a little underwhelmed by my financial prudence when ordering my Mac Pro with 2GB of RAM is an understatement. The Dell I work on at home packs 4GB of RAM, and the mental perception of having a better computer with less RAM just wasn't doing it for me. It was only when I actually used up all 2GB of RAM and started getting a lot of paging when running an unhealthy amount of Rosetta applications at once that I realised more RAM was indeed what my heart desired.

Anyway, I bought another 2GB, 4x512, from Apple. Yes, from Apple. I get a relatively small business discount and, while the end result was still more expensive than the competition, the difference in price compared with other vendors made just purchasing it from Apple the sensible thing to do. The RAM sticks actually look a slightly different colour, but the heat sinks match so, erm, hurrah

Inserting RAM into the Mac Pro really couldn't be any easier. I've never known a better designed system. Sliding out those riser boards and clipping in the 4 additional modules was a joy. It almost brought a tear to my eye having to put the side of the machine back on - it's so beautiful in there!

Yes, I know I now have 8x512 sticks and that this means I can't expand my RAM beyond 4GB without swapping out other modules. But, in the words of Catherine Tate's 'Lauren', "am I boffered?" Fortunately I doubt I'll ever, ever need more than 4GB of RAM and as I have no intentions to ever sell the system it made sense to take cost savings in the 512 sticks being cheaper.

And so all is well with the world and my Mac Pro now has 4GB of RAM. Anyone for WoW?

 

[NATO]

lol, you did *EXACTLY* what I did too... to the letter

 

[technicolor]

I think I need another gig. I am sitting on 3 gigs now, and as I type this I am using up pretty much every ounce of that and even getting some beachballs now that have several rosetta apps open now.

What exactly would constitute a large amount of page ins and page outs?

 

[apfhex]

Hm, I swear my normal Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign tasks actually take up less RAM on my Mac Pro than they did on my PowerBook. I've yet to use up my 2GB of RAM and have much fewer page outs than ins (right now: 0!!!). On my PB I would constantly have all my 1GB RAM full. Right now I'm only using about 700MB.

I'll eventually be putting more RAM in though. Looking forward to the easy fun experience. It really is as good looking inside as outside, maybe better.

 

[phuong]

i bought my 2.66 with 4GB ram option (and with student discount)
right now it's pretty much enough for my regular Photoshop works and running Parallels.
in time .. i might upgrade 4GB more.. so that i can run both Photoshop, Lightroom and Dreamweaver at the same time without worrying abt memories.
btw, just a few days ago, Crucial lowered Mac Pro rams by about $30-50.

 

[miniConvert]

NATO - Hehe, cool

technicolor - Wow, what kind of stuff are you doing to fill that 3GB? What are your current page outs and how long has your system been up? For me any page outs are too many. The first time I ran out of RAM I'd been doing a lot of work in Adobe programs but all was well. Once I'd finished work I fired up WoW to chill for a bit and bugger me the degradation in performance as the Mac Pro thrashed the HDD swapping stuff in and out of RAM was just astonishing!

phuong - I guess I can understand needing more than 4GB RAM if you're using Parallels and then running a lot of pro apps at the same time, especially if you're working with large files. Have you actually started to get page outs on your current setup?

 

[Digidesign]

last night was a frustrating night with my mac pro.

I had a project due, and was working in InDesign CS2, while working in Illustrator CS2 as well. The design wasn't that complex, most vectored type, but when I went to import it into InDesign, it was very, VERY slow. The beach ball would appear often, even when just shifting text to the right or left, or changing the typeface (clicking on the type drop-down would bog the system). I checked Activity Monitor and InDesign was taking up 2.47GB of virtual memory. 2.47GB! With only one document open and some basic layouts, I was getting worse performance than my Powerbook G4 1.5GHz. I'll have to re-check how much actual memory it was taking up, but I don't remember seeing anything high in the memory or disk usage. Will check the page outs as well.

My Mac Pro has 3GB ram, 2x512MB on top riser from Apple, 2x1GB Kingston on bottom. All other benchmarks run fine, games are great. But InDesign CS2 is SLOW. I will try working on Windows later tonight and see if there's the same bog down.

 

[foxxlet]

I hate to say it, but the only way to go right now is to run all the cs2 apps under windows (if you have them!). I run illustrator and photoshop together with loads of open files and windows never slows down. Also, firefox, dreamweaver and IE are usually open too. And winamp and a few other small things. This is on only 1GB of ram. (I know I need more for the mac, but still)

I don't have illustrator on the mac side but photoshop cs2 under rosetta takes up too much ram and that spinning beach ball of unhappiness makes an appearance far too often. It'd help a lot if rosetta wasn't hogging up the precious available resources. I'd hate to try it all with indesign or illustrator open at the same time! Dreamweaver under rosetta runs really slowly and locks up quite a lot with just 1GB - even with nothing else running.

I'm quite angry with adobe not releasing cs2 for intel as it is, I don't want to have to pay for an upgrade of photoshop again even with all the extras, and even worse, wait til middle of next year for it. Why does everyone think they did it this way?

 

[slughead]

Why does everyone think they did it this way?

Because they can ?

 

[Dark]

Yeah I run Aperture, Photoshop, iChat, Firefox, and do torrent downloading all at the same time alot. Im running on 1.5 gigs on my G5 iMac.....I manage. Man I need a MacPro.