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8GB or 16GB Ram for 2011 Macbook Pro?

R

Riptide62

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 25, 2010
32
4
I have a late 2011 13"MacBook Pro which I upgraded with an SSD lately. It only has 4Mb Ram and I want to increase it as I frequently have to have several intensive apps working/open lots of tabs etc. I see that Apple say that 8Mb is the max, and yet I see many reports of users upgrading to 16Mb and claiming it works well..

Amazon has a modest sale today (Crucial 8Mb x2 and 1600Mhz rather than 1333) and I'm wondering if I will actually take a performance hit by using more than the recommended RAM or if not a hit, then receive no benefit above 8Mb.

Any thoughts?
[doublepost=1466438472][/doublepost]Apologies to posters and forum users. I see that several threads covered this very issue. Mods please delete my thread - Thanks.
 
Depends what your doing. If your doing light usage such as Email, web browsing etc you won't see much benefit from having 16MB.

You've already upgraded the slowest device - which was the hard disk, to SSD, which makes a significant difference.

Definitely upgrade to at least 8MB.. 4MB is paltry.
 
The main bottleneck is always the hdd.
Mavericks and newer seem to be optimized for ssds.

I upgraded my 2012 mini with the stock hdd first from 4gb to 10gb and it made quite the difference even with basic tasks.

Because I got a really cheap deal on another ram stick I then went to 16gb and saw absolutely no difference even when running several adobe cloud apps.

The bottleneck with me is still the hdd and I am planning on changing that soon.
 
ron1004 said:
I went to 8GB and then a while later to 16GB on my 2011 17", and it helped a lot with PhotoShop and a couple of other apps, and made a major improvement when using Parallels.

16GB can be had for about $52
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148614
Click to expand...

I have a Mid-2014 Mac Book Pro with 8GB Ram. I run Parallels on it daily for my business. I have noticed my memory pressure is always on a fine line of "good/green" with using 7.50-7.65GB then it will go yellow and stay in the same range of 7.50-7.65GB memory used then go back to green but it bounces back and forth every 5 mins or so... Only thing I use on the windows side is Internet Explorer(my industry has a few carriers that only work on IE), Microsoft Office products(not often), and Outlook 100% of the time.

If I'm not using those I'll be on the Mac side. I leave Parallels running in the background because I need to use Outlook on the windows side for a plugin that will only work on windows and not on the mac side. I've had Parallels on this computer for almost 2 years with no issues.

My computer is running perfect but the wife has been bugging me that she wants a new computer so I was thinking of giving this one to her and upgrading to a newer Mac but I don't think I need the 16GB ram, but then I don't want to have issues with Ram or the computer failing because I'm running it near the max... I only keep computers every 3-4 years at a max.

How much of an improvement did it make going to the 16GB when running Parallels, what did you notice that was different?
 
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