Just wanted to know peoples thoughts whether 8gb of ram is enough on a new 21" imac?
We will be using it for Microsoft office, email, safari and iPhoto.
Thanks
I have 8Gb of ram (spec bellow), and one of the reasons I bought it was for video editing. Lately I was editing a 1hr 40m HD 1080p video in iMovie with a lot of audio effects, as well as visual improvements and titles/text. Exported when I finished that and it taken around 15-20 minutes to export. Throughout that entire experience; I never had any issues.
OSX uses free ram as cache, so you may sometimes so that the system is using as much as 7 out of 8gb when running nothing, but that is because it is caching all apps that have been open since last boot up. And all that memory being used as cache can be cleared instantly. After a fresh boot, OSX Mavericks only uses 1.87Gb of RAM.
Ram compression allows theoretically 12Gb of data to fit in the 8Gb module. OSX also puts aside 8Gb of backing storage to use as virtual Ram if you run out of physical. So in the end you have an 8Gb module(well, 2 X 4), that can fit around 12Gb of data before a maximum of 8Gb of slow backing storage is used, so in the end you theoretically have 20Gb of Ram (added up from 12Gb on 8Gb module using compression and 8Gb on backing storage). If you have the SSD, the virtual 8Gb would not be too slow, but with a hard drive is horrible. But I have never had any page outs on my iMac with 8Gb of RAM, and its not like I haven't pushed it
8Gb is easily enough for your needs. 4Gb would have done you if that was an option, but 8Gb will also help with longevity of the device.
Hope this helped. Good question by the way, makes a change of "Is 32Gb of RAM enough"!
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We will be using it for Microsoft office, email, safari and iPhoto.
Thanks
If it is heavy iPhoto work, I'd say go for the high end iMac like I did (to get 1Gb of GDDR5 VRAM NVidia GeForce GT 750m), if not though the lower on will last you.