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8gb vs 4gb RAM upgrade. is $450 worth doubling my ram?

M

mogulvogel

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 21, 2010
10
0
hey guys i am looking to purchase a new macbook pro and was wondering if it would be good to upgrade my RAM from 4gb to 8. I know i wouldnt use it right now, but on my first purchase i get a pretty decent discount so it would cost about $450 to double my ram. I have read that i probably would not use it right now, but i am working my way to do professional picture edditing. do you think that because of the price it would be worth upgrading?
Thanks for whatever help and advice you can give!
 
For me, I wouldn't be able to use that much RAM.. $450 is a lot of money to be honest. I rather use the cash for a SSD..
 
mogulvogel said:
hey guys i am looking to purchase a new macbook pro and was wondering if it would be good to upgrade my RAM from 4gb to 8. I know i wouldnt use it right now, but on my first purchase i get a pretty decent discount so it would cost about $450 to double my ram. I have read that i probably would not use it right now, but i am working my way to do professional picture edditing. do you think that because of the price it would be worth upgrading?
Thanks for whatever help and advice you can give!
Click to expand...

Professional editing - go with the 8.0gb

I'm using an MBP pre-unibody and 4.0GB is really pushing it hard with Photoshop and Aperture 3.01
 
If you can afford it, go for it. I assume you are buying from OWC since they charge about that amount for an 8 GB RAM set.
 
Professional photo editing should be fine with 4GB. Video editing might require more. As to whether it's worth the extra money, that's entirely up to you.
 
Why not 6gb? Modern laptops support asymmetric dual channel, so using unmatched RAM will be almost as fast (within 1-2%) as matched modules.

Look at Page Outs and Swap Used in activity monitor. If either number is over maybe 100MB, you will be able to use more RAM.
 
I have 4GB and I don’t push up against the limit that often. If you know you’ll be running things like Photoshop, Lightroom, and Aperture all day, or multitasking a lot, then go for the upgrade. I think you should be fine with just 4GB, though.

runtohell121 said:
For me, I wouldn't be able to use that much RAM.. $450 is a lot of money to be honest. I rather use the cash for a SSD..
Click to expand...

Agreed. The performance increase from an SSD will always be there. All that extra memory will only be useful when you use up the initial 4GB.

In fact, the SSD would probably improve performance when accessing the pagefile. So even if you do run out of physical memory, the SSD would make it a less painful experience.
 
It was a huge improvement for me, but I use Parallels alot and usually have quite a few programs going at once.

I could never go back to 4GB now.
 
thanks guys for your replies. one more thing, because the new macbook pros are a unibody design, how much would it cost for apple to take it and add ram later on?
 
mogulvogel said:
thanks guys for your replies. one more thing, because the new macbook pros are a unibody design, how much would it cost for apple to take it and add ram later on?
Click to expand...

It's a DIY.. or you can always pay premium to take it to them or possibly Fry's to upgrade.
 
what if you wanted to play video games on it, what would the preformance be compared to the standard hdd drive
 
mogulvogel said:
what if you wanted to play video games on it, what would the preformance be compared to the standard hdd drive
Click to expand...

Video game depends on the graphic card.... SSD will make the games load faster and start the game faster than the traditional HDD
 
mogulvogel said:
what if you wanted to play video games on it, what would the preformance be compared to the standard hdd drive
Click to expand...

It will help just about everything, including the hard drive scratch disk for Photoshop. Also, as to your original question it would be much smarter to get an SSD than the 8GB. You just won't need it (and I have been a professional graphic designer for seven years). Grab an Intel SSD or wait until the new Vertx 2's come out and don't look back.
 
better get 6GB, if you have 4GB it means that you have 2 x 2GB Chips, so just get 1 4GB one, when they get cheaper get the other one, since 6GB vs. 8GB isn't as bad as 4GB vs 8GB
 
Depends on what you do. If you're running out of RAM, adding more will certainly help speed things up. If you're not, I would definitely opt for an SSD.
 
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