PowerMac RAM - Would 8gb be beneficial?

[cineman]

I'm waiting for my PM 2.7 for home to ship and I'm trying to determine the best way to spend my money. I use FC Studio and transfer a lot of video files back and forth to external FW800 drives. Would it be more beneficial to purchase a G-SATA 500gb external drive or would I see a better benefit for what I am doing by expanding my 4gb RAM to 8gb.

I do tend to use FCP and Motion as well as LiveType simultaneously. Any PM's out there with 8gb, I'c love to hear your experience with this. Thanks.

 

[joecool85]

Only two guys that I know of with that much ram right now...Lacero and iGary. As far as I know, it's money well spent. But you'd really want to ask them. Oddly enough, since I'm getting a PM capable of that much RAM, I'd also like to know.

 

[mad jew]

I think iGary only has 6GB... I mean really, what a slow POS!

8GB of RAM is very expensive, as you probably know, and although I don't have any owner experience with anything near that much, I'd still say the external drive is the better value for your moulah.

 

[joecool85]

Well, it's not cheap, $100 a stick...but that's not too bad when you think about it. btw, geeks.com is where it is $100 a stick. Actually $96.50 or something.

 

[CanadaRAM]

would I see a better benefit for what I am doing by expanding my 4gb RAM to 8gb.

Well, you will see a benefit of 8 Gb over 4 Gb when your total data and application load exceeds 4096 Mb in RAM usage. Sorry to be as circular as that, but that's how it works. You will see little or no benefit until you break the 4 Gb barrier in usage. Why don't you monitor what you are doing for a while -- if you start seeing a lot of PageOuts as you are doing your normal work, then you would consider moving to 6 or 8 Gb.

Obviously, configure your machine with 1 Gb modules to leave yourself room for extra RAM -- don't load up on 8 x 512 Mb modules whatever you do.

THe other speed boosting technique that has been discussed here is to have 2 internal SATA drives - one exclusively for System and Applications, and one exclusively for your primary data. If you can choose an ultra-fast hard drive for the System drive (which is also you scratch drive area) so much the better.

Lastly, if you install a SATA card and external SATA drive(s), then you can split your drives three ways - 1) System (&scratch), 2) Applications, and 3) Data. This would give the optimum division of duties between three different set of drive heads.

With a FirmTek Seritek 2-bay swappable SATA external enclosure, you can also swap in more hard drive space at will.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[greatdevourer]

RAM = speed on PPCs. 256MB RAM, and the Cube lags. 1GB, and it blazes along like nobody's business. If you're doing lots of heavy-proc video stuff, you will most likely notice the difference

 

[Sharewaredemon]

Where I've noticed RAM speeds things up (or having more RAM will cause your computer to not slow down) is when you are doing RAM previews of any sort.

Once you run out of RAM while doing a RAM preview your computer will use the VM which slows everything down as it is writing to your hard-drive (sorta).