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Early 2008 macbook pro: 6GB RAM?

R

Ravich

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 20, 2009
773
0
Portland, OR
I was doing some research regarding upgrades to my laptop and originally read that my laptop only supports up to 2x2GB RAM, but then I found information saying that people have gotten 6GB to work with these models.

http://i.imgur.com/bR8l65m.png



Anyone here have more information regarding this? Upgrading from 4 to 6GB would be a pretty big upgrade, but I'm not sure if there are any risks.

Thanks!
 
So I dont need to worry about which slot or anything? I can just buy a 4GB stick from macsales and swap it in for one of my 2GB sticks?
 
Excellent, thankyou!


Edit: okay, one last question. I was looking at the macsales RAM recommendations where they have you select the model range that your mac falls into, and I noticed that the 4GB stick for my model costs 100$, whereas a 4GB stick for later models costs only 43$ or so.

Why is this and do I need to buy the RAM that macsales specifies for my model?
 
Last edited:
I believe the difference is DDR2 vs DDR3 ram. A DDR2 4GB stick is more expensive than a DDR3 4GB stick. Your machine only takes DDR2.
 
Ravich said:
Anyone able to help me out with this? :3
Click to expand...

The older machine uses DDR2 sticks, which are pretty much obsolete these days, you're paying extra due to the fact that they are only producing a few for people that have older computers.

DDR3 being the norm now, it's the most produced, hence the cheapest to buy.
 
Ravich said:
damnit -.-


Alright, thanks everyone. Guess I'll just have to drop 100$ if I decide to up my RAM.
Click to expand...

I'm using an early 2008 macbook pro too and if you decide to upgrade to 6GB, you will lose dual channel since you will be using 2x4GB sticks instead of the 2x2GB that is recommended.

My MBP is already starting to feel pretty slow and I have 4GB too. I doubt going up to 6GB will make a significant difference. Maybe time to upgrade? I know I'm waiting for the rMBP to update before buying.
 
I have an early '08 MacBook Pro with 6GB RAM. I got the upgrade some time ago and at first I too was worried about how much impact dual channel would make. Given the fact that when I was at 4GB of RAM my computer was constantly paging in and out, the 6GB upgrade made it much much faster. However it is a $100 upgrade, and I probably would not do the upgrade again if I was doing it today as opposed to over a year back. Even with 6GB RAM I'm thinking it might be time to retire this old pro.
 
I'm holding onto this thing for as long as I can, but I'm not sure the 100$ ram upgrade will be worth it. I just upgraded the HDD and replaced one of the fans, and this thing also has a worthless battery that recently started randomly giving out at a 80% charge or so, and it's a pretty penny to replace that.

I suppose I'll skip out on the RAM and just hold onto this for as long as it'll go for. Maybe get a small SSD boot drive if I see a particularly good deal, but that can be transferred over to a new MBP anyway, right?
 
Ah, you have the same battery issue as I do. I don't even get a notification these days. If I'm not plugged in, it can even power off at 100% which is really weird. It doesn't even save all the information to the disk so I have to manually boot it up again which takes about 50s - 1 minute.

I think if you really want to hold on to it, the MBP will feel noticeably faster with an SSD. I'm running Mavericks right now and 4GB seems sufficient to run XCode + Firefox + iTunes with no problems.
 
Ravich said:
I suppose I'll skip out on the RAM and just hold onto this for as long as it'll go for. Maybe get a small SSD boot drive if I see a particularly good deal, but that can be transferred over to a new MBP anyway, right?
Click to expand...

You should be able to transfer the SSD, as long as your next MacBook Pro isn't a Retina one (obviously wouldn't need to transfer it then).

I just replaced my Early 2008 MacBook Pro with a new one because all the random upgrade expenses probably would've been enough to keep me happy for another year or two, but would've also put me about halfway towards a new Mac. It's always a tough call when it's time to stop sinking money into an older machine.
 
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