I just saw that crucial had a 16gb kit (http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=CFF6D982A5CA7304) for $260 which is a hell of a lot cheaper than the previous $1600 for another 16gb kit I saw somewhere. I just want to know if I should spend the extra money to get that instead of the 8gb kit I was originally planning to get. Will there be a big change in performance like being able to play games, mostly RTS, (Starcraft 2) on the highest graphics without hiccups?
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Is 16GB RAM worth it?
- Thread starter Vinsanity93
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Games will not benefit whatsoever with a higher amount of RAM, unless you currently are paging out while gaming because you have other programs open as well. So no, from a gaming standpoint, it's not worth it at all.
Games are mostly CPU and GPU dependent, since you can't upgrade the graphics card in about 99% of laptops made nowadays, increasing your RAM will do nothing for your FPS nor will allow you to run more details than you currently do.
The vast majority of people would see no benefit from going to 16GB of RAM. It sounds like you currently have 4GB...unless you're having tons and tons of page outs (check your activity monitor to see) then that 16GB is just going to be a waste of money for you.
Even for running Parallels 8GB is enough. 16GB is too much into future, and you will regret spending so much money now for nothing. There is no point preparing for future too early - you buy right equipments at right time and now is not right time, unless you are running few Photoshop files, parallels, Final Cut Pro at same time.
If you don't know whether you would benefit from 16 GB RAM, then you won't.
Only very special usage patterns benefit from that amount of RAM, e.g. running several virtual machines at the same time. Those people already know that they would benefit from more RAM, because they probably spent some time optimizing the allocation of RAM for the different machines.
Starcraft II doesn't even benefit from going from 4 GB to 8 GB. The only benefit of 8 GB in that case is that you can leave your browser and other crap running while gaming, without affecting your performance.
Only very special usage patterns benefit from that amount of RAM, e.g. running several virtual machines at the same time. Those people already know that they would benefit from more RAM, because they probably spent some time optimizing the allocation of RAM for the different machines.
Starcraft II doesn't even benefit from going from 4 GB to 8 GB. The only benefit of 8 GB in that case is that you can leave your browser and other crap running while gaming, without affecting your performance.
Newegg / Cosair 2x8 16GB for $ 179.99
( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233251 )
( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233251 )
If you are that concerned with memory you should just ditch your laptop and get a Mac Pro dual processor which supports 64GB of RAM!
/just kidding. 16GB on a MacBook is nice
/just kidding. 16GB on a MacBook is nice
It's been proven before that you can definitely benefit from 16GB working on large photoshop files. I've had things that exceeded 10,000 pixels in height at 16 bpc. It's bad enough in rgb. If you have to open something like that in cmyk, it's brutal (given the fourth channel) once you start adding layers. Basically with a lot of ram it can mostly bypass generating scratch data. While I gave a somewhat extreme example, much of the time the solution to photoshop sluggishness is ram or an ssd with adequate free space(for faster scratch disk space) rather than faster cpus. Anyway my final cut pro experience is more limited, but with a lot of these programs it's more about the size of your projects with everything added than precisely what programs you are running. The same applies to Parallels.
Edit: For the OP, gaming performance is unlikely to change by much if anything. You're probably limited by the gpu and that games don't necessarily run great on OSX in general assuming you're not running many other processes in the background.
Well, right now I have 6 GB of 16GB free. Which means that two days ago I could not do what I am doing right now without churning through pagefiles.
I am running: chrome, 14 tabs. open office, 4 documents. terminal. textedit. ical. imail. textwrangler, two windows. activity monitor. parallels, 4gb ubuntu vm.
Not always true, as the OS will try and utilize as much memory as it can, even though it might not technically need it. You could probably run the same programs without the page ins issue with 8GB of RAM. Until you watch the Page Ins needed, you will never truly know how much RAM you need.
Ram
I have a Late 2011 MacBook Pro 13inch i5, 4GB, 500GB HD I am about to get into Editing Like Final Cut Pro for Call of Duty Gameplays for YouTube in your opinion would 8GB DDR3 1333mhz be good or 16GB better. 8GB is only 44.99 on macsales.com and 16GB is 244.99 also on macsales.com. Also I am having a lot of trouble out of Safari saying safari can not find page or server if anyone has a fix besides clearing cache please help!!!!??!?!
I have a Late 2011 MacBook Pro 13inch i5, 4GB, 500GB HD I am about to get into Editing Like Final Cut Pro for Call of Duty Gameplays for YouTube in your opinion would 8GB DDR3 1333mhz be good or 16GB better. 8GB is only 44.99 on macsales.com and 16GB is 244.99 also on macsales.com. Also I am having a lot of trouble out of Safari saying safari can not find page or server if anyone has a fix besides clearing cache please help!!!!??!?!
16GB is nice on my early 2011 MBP.
However, a big bottleneck is the hard drive (I have a stock 750GB 5400 RPM drive). Everytime I launch apps, come back from sleeping/going to sleep it's very slow. Livable, but slow. It seems like the CPU is fast, RAM is fast, just the HD is slow.
Can't wait for 512GB SSD's going on sale.
However, a big bottleneck is the hard drive (I have a stock 750GB 5400 RPM drive). Everytime I launch apps, come back from sleeping/going to sleep it's very slow. Livable, but slow. It seems like the CPU is fast, RAM is fast, just the HD is slow.
Can't wait for 512GB SSD's going on sale.
For 99 dollars, I don't know how you can go wrong! http://trdd.us/pn If this is any indication, I think prices may start dropping soon for other brands as well. But if the only reason you want it is for gaming, I don't think it will really improve that too much. Games don't even use that much RAM, so it wont really make much of a difference unless you're currently using only 2 gigs.
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