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21.5" - 16GB RAM or 2.9GHz upgrade?

C

chris1987

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 21, 2008
40
0
Want to upgrade one or the other but probably couldn't afford nor justify both.

Am i right in thinking these will roughly be the same price?

Useage..

Photoshop
Xcode
Browsing
Casual Gaming

Everything points towards the RAM upgrade.. just thought i'd make sure.

Cheers!
 
I think if you do a lot of coding the processor is important, because you want stuff to compile as quickly as possible.

But lots of RAM is also important :/
 
MetzoPaino said:
I think if you do a lot of coding the processor is important, because you want stuff to compile as quickly as possible.

But lots of RAM is also important :/
Click to expand...

Totally, especially with Xcode. Built quite a few 100mb+ apps for clients recently and it's getting so annoying sitting here waiting for the app to compile.

BUT Photoshop absolutely destroys my memory at the moment - currently have a 4GB Unibody w/ 2.4GHz Duo CPU.

I'm intrigued as to how they are going to price the 16GB upgrade. It cost £80 to go from 4GB > 8GB for the 2011 iMac.. is it safe to say it would be £160 (give or take)?
 
You should be fine with 8 GB - with that I don't think you'd run short in Photoshop. The slight increase in CPU could then go towards improving Photoshop tasks and compile times in Xcode.

Also, are you going to get flash storage or a Fusion Drive? You'd probably see the most benefit there generally :)
 
Platskies said:
You should be fine with 8 GB - with that I don't think you'd run short in Photoshop. The slight increase in CPU could then go towards improving Photoshop tasks and compile times in Xcode.

Also, are you going to get flash storage or a Fusion Drive? You'd probably see the most benefit there generally :)
Click to expand...

Not sure. Only takes a few 10MB+ images in Photoshop and some editing to leave me with 20MB of RAM left (whilst Xcode etc is open). I spend alot of time freeing memory, closing images that i no longer need open and restarting my MacBook to maintain a sufficient amount of RAM available. If i no longer do this with 8GB of RAM then i'd be pretty confident in saying that i wouldn't have trouble maxing it out as well.

Re. Fusion Drive - depends on how much it costs. Will wait for some benchmarks before even considering it. It's a little hasty to commit to a new piece of software (yes, it is software before anyone tries to corrects me) by Apple just by judging it on a fancy Keynote slide with some of their internal benchmarks.. i doubt it's as good as what they are making it out to be. Also i'm not that keen on the HDD/SSD constantly swapping around files.. that will lead to an increased amount of disk usage and ultimately a decrease in lifespan - correct?
 
About the FD: Yes, lifetime would decrease from software if that was the case.

Another idea... is lots of storage important? If not, maybe upgrading the default HD to flash instead of upping the CPU might be an option? Generally anything that uses the disk like launching applications to browsing documentation in Xcode would be noticeably faster.
 
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