I have a 2009 Mac Pro flashed to 2010 with 12 cores with only 32GB ram. I also have a GTX670 FTW GPU installed. I use this machine for Adobe Premiere Pro for video editing. Will going from 32GB ram to 64GB ram be any better or wasting my money?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Going from 32GB to 64GB ram better?
- Thread starter joot
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Yes it will be better, especially if you're doing larger or more complex edits, interested in doing 4K or doing a lot of multitasking with the rest of Adobe CC.
Memory is cheap right now, go for it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10512/price-check-q3-2016-dram-prices-down-over-20-since-early-2015
Memory is cheap right now, go for it.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10512/price-check-q3-2016-dram-prices-down-over-20-since-early-2015
If you are near to or exceeding 32GB of memory use, then upgrading will be extremely helpful. If you are not, then it will not help at all.
It is trivially easy to check memory utilization. Just run Activity Monitor while doing work and check "Memory Pressure".
It is trivially easy to check memory utilization. Just run Activity Monitor while doing work and check "Memory Pressure".
How does Activity Monitor determine memory pressure? Does it look only at free space and page faults, or does it include filesystem cache misses and hits?
Large filesystem caches can be a huge benefit - but if your applications are filling most of RAM there's very little caching possible. In that situation, extra memory can help a lot - even though you haven't "run out of memory" in the classic sense.
(And caches are orders of magnitude faster than SSDs....)
That is a very good point to bring up. Yes, in Yosemite and later they include cached files in Memory Pressure.
I remember many people complaining back then that when they upgraded, their memory utilization shot way up. They assumed it was bloat, but really it was OS X making better use of otherwise underutilized memory in order to benefit from the advantages you mention.
In Ask Different:
Here's a picture from a 20-core server that's doing some data mining on about 200 GB of data.
A naïve viewpoint would be that 16 GiB would be plenty, because the application is using less that 14 GiB. In fact, that 200+ GiB of cache is critical for performance.
[doublepost=1469558686][/doublepost]
Thanks!
I agree. I understand the benefit. I've been using RAM to cache files for increased performance as far back as the Commodore 64.
I'm not suggesting that the "standby" in that picture from Windows(?) shouldn't be counted, nor that "cached" in OS X shouldn't be counted. All the utilization information including the cache is right there in the window. I do not mean to imply that only the graph alone should be taken into account and not the data right next to it.
Boot time will be slow! My machine takes ages to complete the Ram check during efi load. It reminds me of watching old servers boot! At least those show you the bits as it progressed through the sectors.
Not really anything to worry about if you put your Mac to sleep mostly instead of full shutdowns.
Not really anything to worry about if you put your Mac to sleep mostly instead of full shutdowns.
Can't you disable the full memory check?
The default on many other x64 BIOS programs is to skip the check unless the amount of RAM has changed since the last boot. (Clever default - if you add memory it checks it the first boot only.)
Something at the back of my mind (from maybe decades ago) tells me yes, but – for modern Mac usage – I can't find anything amongst the answers to Is there a list of available boot-args for darwin / OS X