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16GB RAM in an iMac?

L

luke.mac1

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 1, 2011
87
0
United Kingdom
I just bought a 27" iMac (SSD so shipment date is 22nd June), and then bought 16GB of RAM from crucial for about £130. I was just wondering though; is that overkill? I mean, how much RAM can I need really?
I do all sorts of stuff on my 2008 white MacBook and I use 3 of the 4GB RAM most of the time. I'm not a Pro video editor or anything but I do a little bit occasionally, mainly with iMovie; other than that I probably will end up playing a few games, watching HD movies and obv. surfing the web. I just can't believe that you can buy 16GB of memory for £130! When I upgraded my MacBook memory it cost £160 for 4GB!
 
You could always return the 16 and buy 8, for 65 pounds, then add it to your 4 for 12 total.

half as much money for 12 gigs
 
I just picked up a brandy new base 21 iMac and ordered 16GB of RAM from OWC. I'll never use that much RAM but what the heck. ;)
 
Enough RAM . . .

640 KBytes is all anyone will ever need, and the world will never need more than five computers.

( to paraphrase two well known prophets of technology ) ;) :p
 
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ghboard2010 said:
640 KBytes is all anyone will ever need, and the world will never need more than five computers.

( to paraphrase two well known prophets of technology ) ;) :p
Click to expand...

He's already said he never said that first one.
 
I went with 12gb. I paid $90 and am very happy with my purchase. 16 is a bit much but it really depends on what you are doing. I am constantly editing videos while surfing web, doing code, checking email, instant messaging, listening to music and other things. I have at least 15 apps open at any given time. I am finding that I always have about 7gb free and I feel I use ALOT of apps.
 
I've got 8GB currently in my iMac, but will shortly be upping that to 16GB as I find 8GB isn't enough for my needs.
Having said that, it's not uncommon for me to be running 2 Windows 7 VMs, Pages, Safari, Mail, iPhoto, iTunes, Eclipse and Photoshop and end up with 2GB or so of swap in use
 
I put 8GB of OWC RAM in my 2011 iMac and left the 4GB that came with it inside for a total of 12GB. Not bad, but there is no such thing as too much RAM! Better have the memory capacity if needed than not have enough.
 
Hmm . . .

Icy1007 said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)



He's already said he never said that first one.
Click to expand...

Could be a case of plausible deniability. Say anything, deny everything ;) :D
 
16gb ram

RAM, like horsepower and money is something you can never have too much of. I have the previous generation, summer 2010, model 27" iMac with 16GB RAM, and have not been sorry. I do a lot of photo work with Aperture, and Adobe Photoshop CS5. RAM is cheap now, and if you plan on keeping your Mac for a long time, go ahead and fill it up because software will only get more demanding.
 
I will definetilely need 16GB later, but thinking about getting 4GB now.

Does the Mac need special RAM? I saw 16GB Kingston for like 279€ and RAM that is for iMac for 899€

I just read the 4GB model is a MC511D/A - that one has four slots, right? So I can go up to 12GB first and then see if I need to have the 2x2GB replaced
 
Last edited:
Is the RAM in the 2011 MBP the same as the 2011 iMac? I have 4gb I took out of my MBP when I upgraded it to 8gb and I thought I may just stick this extra 4 gb in the iMac when I purchase it making a total of 8gb.
 
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