8GB Ram Upgrade with Snow Leopard

[AppleThis&That]

I'm curious, now that we have Snow Leopard, will the extra 4GB of ram make much of an improvement in these newer 8GB iMac desktop computers? It's still spendy for the upgrade but curious.

 

[HLdan]

Ram is only as useful as what you use to take advantage of it. Maxing out the ram does not speed up your computer, it just helps prevent it from slowing down when you are running apps that will utilize a lot of it.

 

[AppleThis&That]

Ram is only as useful as what you use to take advantage of it. Maxing out the ram does not speed up your computer, it just helps prevent it from slowing down when you are running apps that will utilize a lot of it.

Thanks for your help. Yeah, the computer is very fast as it is but was curious.

 

[ae3265]

Ram is only as useful as what you use to take advantage of it. Maxing out the ram does not speed up your computer, it just helps prevent it from slowing down when you are running apps that will utilize a lot of it.

More RAM also allows for more file system caching, which will generally speed up many operations. Adding RAM, depending on one's situation may speed things up.

Considering the prevalence of virtual machines, more RAM is definitely desirable for those!

For the most part, 2gb of RAM will run most OS's, including OSX reasonably. 4gb will be faster, especially as multiple applications are opened and the extra ram avoids the page outs.

6-8gb of RAM is handy when dealing with multiple VM's. It should also be helpful in dealing with very large files and things like movie rendering.

If you are not dealing with needing the larger RAM and your machine uses DDR3, then wait for the prices to drop. If you have a machine that runs DDR2, for the most part, it's dirt cheap, max it out if you are not going to upgrade any time soon.