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4 gigs of ram on a Macbook overkill?

D

desistyle

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 20, 2007
152
3
Is it really necessary to upgrade my macbook to 4 gigs of RAM? I have 1 gig in my macbook right now and I can't decide whether to upgrade to 2 gigs or 4.

Will I see a lot of benefit if I upgraded to 4, or will 2 be sufficient? When I'm multitasking in iTunes, Safari, dashboard, etc..my free ram is only around 20 megs.

Also, will applications launch faster with more RAM? Or is this limitation due to the speed of the Hard drive?

Thanks!
 
For the price of 4gb these days ~$100 last time I checked (OWC has great ram, great prices), it's hardly worth it NOT to upgrade to 4gb.
 
I made the decision last week to upgrade to 4GBs. I probably don't need the full amount, but for less than $100, I'll never have to think about RAM in my MB again. I'm maxed out!
 
It depends on how old the macbook is. The older ones max out at 3GB, and the SR ones max out at 4GB. I just ordered myself 4GBs of Kingston from Newegg for 100, can't beat that... But I also have a new SR blackbook, so mine can handle it.
 
i agree as well - go with the 4gb. RAM becomes really important if you decide to run parallels or vmware. i have 2gigs of RAM in my macbook pro (that's the max for this model) and if I'm running 3 or 4 other apps + vmware, it slows to a crawl. i only wish I could put 3 or 4 gigs of RAM in this machine.
 
Ram, etc.

Initially the MacBook didn't support the full 4 GBs, correct? I guess that has been resolved by Leopard or another update?

I have seen an Omni Tech. vendor referenced here before, any tips on upgrading, or other suggestions on ram?

I prefer to upgrade the ram and my hard drive at the same time. Is there a site that offers both a combo and/or related tools/guide, etc (Torx-6)?

Thanks
 
Yea I wonder if the old 3GB limit apple stated was based on hardware or software. 32bit OSX and Windows couldn't address more than this so it would have created more headaches if they had listed the hardware capability and then customers start calling wondering why they are missing a gig of ram. Now that OSX is 64 bit they don't have to worry about this and apple could care less what windows users do.
 
PghSteelers said:
Initially the MacBook didn't support the full 4 GBs, correct? I guess that has been resolved by Leopard or another update?

I have seen an Omni Tech. vendor referenced here before, any tips on upgrading, or other suggestions on ram?

I prefer to upgrade the ram and my hard drive at the same time. Is there a site that offers both a combo and/or related tools/guide, etc (Torx-6)?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Only the latest revision of the MacBook supports 4 GB's. They use the santa rosa chipset...
 
I'm quite sure that the 2GB and 3GB limit is a hardware issue. The May 2006 MacBooks support up to 2GB of RAM, the November 2006 and May 2007 MacBooks can support up to 3GB(Although Apple recommends 2GB because of the use of dual channel and the MacBooks use the GMA so the performance increase wouldn't have been enough more for the price using 3GB), and the November 2007 MacBooks support up to 4 GB of RAM.

The reason that Windows doesn't support more than 3 GB(It's a rough area. Depends on the computer and the maximum can span from 2GB to 4GB.) is because it's a 32-bit OS. Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista x64 can support more than 4GB of RAM.
 
I pretty much immediately upgraded my BlackBook from 1GB to 2GB and the performance increase is substantial. Due to running VMware Fusion, I upgraded to 4GB (effectively 3.3 in my pre-SR model) late last year. For day-to-day operations, the 2->4GB jump was pretty insignificant. But it sure is nice to have that headroom for the Virtual Machines!

So I'd say if you are running Fusion, Parallels, or anything else that is very memory intensive, drop the few extra bucks and go with 4GB. But for most users, 2GB is the "sweet spot."
 
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