16gb vs. 32gb ram. Advice needed.

[ChitoCrisis]

Resolved.

 

[WJKramer]

Now I can buy an iMac. I had been waiting for an update. Anyways I'm going to get the 27 inch iMac with 4gb VRAM. But I don't know if I should go for 16 or 32gb ram. I'm going to use a lot of Maya to do modeling and animation as well as rendering. I will also use photoshop and flash to name a few. What do you suggest? I might also do some gaming on it. Nothing serious obviously.

And how long would it take to get it shipped to the store or my home if I were to buy one today?

Thanks!

I just bought a maxed out iMac...32GB, 4GB VRAM, SSD shipped to MD. Delivers Oct 8-10th.

 

[0983275]

If you're thinking about configuring it to 16/32GB RAM, don't bother, go with 8GB and buy the RAM separately, it's a lot cheaper.

8GB is the absolute minimum for what you're doing, 16GB is recommended, 32GB will give you plenty of space for the future.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

If you're thinking about configuring it to 16/32GB RAM, don't bother, go with 8GB and buy the RAM separately, it's a lot cheaper.

Yes, the price Apple charges for the upgrade is nuts. The 27" has four ram slots, two of which are empty when you buy it with 8gb. So your least-cost upgrade is to buy 16gb from Crucial or Kensington (or whoever you prefer) and put it in the two available slots. That gives you 24 gb, which should be pretty good for what you want.

 

[leman]

Unless you want to play some demanding games, skip the GPU upgrade. And as other suggested, you can buy and upgrade the RAM yourself, its very easy.

 

[ChitoCrisis]

Resolved.

 

[WJKramer]

Yes but...

 

[MacCruiskeen]

Thank you guys so much! You saved me a lot of money. I had no idea I could upgrade ram on the iMacs. It's going to be my first one (I've only had a MBP).

The 27" is the last one with the option, which Apple doesn't really advertise. The 21" is a closed box.

 

[nutmac]

Now I can buy an iMac. I had been waiting for an update. Anyways I'm going to get the 27 inch iMac with 4gb VRAM. But I don't know if I should go for 16 or 32gb ram.

Short answer: If you have to ask, you probably don't need 32 GB.

The best way to find out is get 8GB iMac for now, use it for a day under typical workload. Then run Activity Monitor and see what Page Out (Swap Used in Mavericks) is in Memory tab. If it's 0GB, you don't need more than 8GB. The combination of current memory + page out (swap used) is the minimum amount of memory you should have for optimal performance.

For my own personal workload, the ideal amount of RAM is about 20GB.

 

[AppleDroid]

Short answer: If you have to ask, you probably don't need 32 GB.

The best way to find out is get 8GB iMac for now, use it for a day under typical workload. Then run Activity Monitor and see what Page Out (Swap Used in Mavericks) is in Memory tab. If it's 0GB, you don't need more than 8GB. The combination of current memory + page out (swap used) is the minimum amount of memory you should have for optimal performance.

For my own personal workload, the ideal amount of RAM is about 20GB.

Same here. I have 24GB in my Mac Pro and the only time I come close to using all of it, and require a page file, is when I'm dong heavy HD editing in Premiere or After Effects. LR and Photoshop rarely fill it up.

 

[ChitoCrisis]

Resolved.

 

[KaraH]

if you are getting the 27" do NOT buy any more ram than what it ships with. Buy it from OWC or some other 3rd party place. Not only is it cheeper it is trivial to install.

If you were getting the 21.5, yeah, might as well max it out because you need to open up your machine to get at the slot.