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Anyone maxed the RAM in their MBP to 3Gb?

B

Blue Velvet

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Jul 4, 2004
21,929
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I've got a 17" 2.33 with the stock 2gb RAM in it and the price of 2gb modules seems to have come down recently in the UK to make this worth considering.

Has anyone else done this? Did it make much difference to what you do with your machine? I've read that it can might slow things down but I'm hazy on the details.

BTW: I'm running Quark and CS through Rosetta at the mo and will be upgrading to CS3 and Quark 7 (both Universal) soonish.

Cheers
BV
 
From your phrasing, Eidorian, it sounds as if you think PC2-5300 SO-DIMM prices would start going up instead of down.

Upgrading the RAM in your machine is only really useful if you start getting large numbers of Page Outs during normal operation. And by "normal operation" I mean that you should run whatever is going to be the most memory-intensive task you're likely to be performing on a regular basis, and if you start getting page outs...upgrade the RAM. You can see how many page outs there are in Activity Viewer.
 
NickD said:
Max it out if you can afford. No one ever regrets more RAM.
Click to expand...

I understand that quite clearly... just wondering whether the cost/benefit ratio is OK right now given that a 2gb stick is worth over the equivalent of US$150 over here.
 
I got a 2GB module from OWC and it works great. Going from 2GB to 3GB made a big difference for me. The page in to page out ratio is a lot less. It was worth it in my opinion!

Nuc
 
Blue Velvet said:
I understand that quite clearly... just wondering whether the cost/benefit ratio is OK right now given that a 2gb stick is worth over the equivalent of US$150 over here.
Click to expand...

The cost/benefit ratio is purely personal to your usage. It all depends on whether you're regularly getting an increasing page outs count. If you don't have any problem with running out of physical memory then all you're going to be doing is wasting your money. This notion of "buy as much as you can afford" is ridiculous; you buy as much as you need and can practically use, not just waste a bunch of money getting more RAM than you'll ever need. Personally, I've got 2GB of RAM and haven't found any use in upgrading. No video rendering here...just some gaming and CAD. I don't need it. You might; it all depends.
 
And if you virtualize...

If you run Parallels or VMWare on it, max out your RAM. You will need all o it you can get.
 
Blue Velvet said:
I understand that quite clearly... just wondering whether the cost/benefit ratio is OK right now given that a 2gb stick is worth over the equivalent of US$150 over here.
Click to expand...

A little bit less, actually, unless you do not want to shop around for the cheapest deals. I maxed out my MBP SR for £128 incl p&P. If I waited a day, I could have saved another £5 on that. You can cut down the cost further by ebaying the original sticks, once you are certain that you are going to keep your MBP.

You are right about the potential slowdown, if you do not need that much memory as all of the 4GB needs to be initialised on startup adding a little overhead, but I have not had this long enough to benchmark. Although I had not been doing anything particularly heavy before bar the odd game or movie recoding, I was getting pageouts on 2GB even after closing all the other applications. Crazy.

It's worth it for Parallels/Fusion, and as Eidorian hinted, memory prices are on the up.
 
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