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4GB better than 8GB?

S

strausd

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jul 11, 2008
2,998
1
Texas
OK, so I am running OS X 10.6.2 and just recently upgraded my unibody 3.06ghz MBP from 4GB to 8GB of RAM. I used geekbench to test it out and for

-4GB the three scores were: 4624, 4622, 4625
-8GB the three scores were: 4622, 5615, 4596

-the memory performance for the three with 4GB respectively were: 2904, 2883, 2884
-the memory performance for the three with 8GB respectively were: 2861, 2869, 2870

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't more RAM generally make one's computer faster? I don't understand how I doubled the RAM and so no improvement, in fact it seems that it would be better for me to keep the 4GB in. Can someone explain to me what the heck is going on here?

Thanks
 
So it was just coincidence that each time I ran it with 4GB it was better than with 8GB? And I also just changed from "better battery life" to "higher performance" and im getting in the 4300s and 4200s, I don't understand how this can be normal.
 
Differences less than 1% are ignorable.

There are also a tiny issue of the computer having twice as big a space to manage memory.

When you said you changed to High performance, was it the overall score that changed to 42-4300? Or the memory score?
 
Try this

Run the exact same tests, but do it with as many apps running as possible, things that really tax the memory. Do it with both 4GB and 8GB and you should see a pretty big difference
 
bsblvnv said:
Run the exact same tests, but do it with as many apps running as possible, things that really tax the memory. Do it with both 4GB and 8GB and you should see a pretty big difference
Click to expand...

Won't work. If the memory was full both under 4GB and under 8GB then any app wanting memory would wait the same time for the system to free up memory.

Besides, a benchmark like that would probably try to grab as sequential a segment of RAM as possible. Meaning every result should be very close regardless of how much memory was free.
 
The way things work is the more memory in the system the more the management the memory needs. This management is done by the CPU and thus there is a little less CPU to perform the tasks; thus the performance goes down.
 
Cyclon is correct. More RAM is pretty much always better. Benchmarks are never a good indicator of system performance when it comes to daily use. When you have backups running (Time Machine) and many tabs in Safari, even 4GB doesn't cut it. With 8GB, you're improving performance and runtime. More RAM widens the gap between applications accessing the RAM and applications accessing your (slower) hard drive.
 
Geekbench is measuring the rate of transfer to and from the RAM. That doesn't change based on capacity. So a Mac with 2GB of RAM and a Mac with 8GB of RAM will score the same in terms of transfer rates, providing the RAM is the same speed. What higher amounts of RAM will do is allow more applications to run without paging to disk. Paging is what slows down most computers.
 
SA22C said:
Geekbench is measuring the rate of transfer to and from the RAM. That doesn't change based on capacity. So a Mac with 2GB of RAM and a Mac with 8GB of RAM will score the same in terms of transfer rates, providing the RAM is the same speed. What higher amounts of RAM will do is allow more applications to run without paging to disk. Paging is what slows down most computers.
Click to expand...

Well if that's true, why was there still such a big difference?
 
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