MBP 15" i7 4gb vs 8gb RAM

[whatusername]

I'm curious as to the performance difference between 4gb and 8gb RAM on a MBP i7. Please let me know your thoughts.

 

[alphaod]

There are no differences unless you need more RAM 4GB of RAM, at which point the 8GB configuration will be faster; otherwise they should be pretty much the same.

 

[man02195]

I'm curious as to the performance difference between 4gb and 8gb RAM on a MBP i7. Please let me know your thoughts.

If you commonly run pshop, parallels or vmware, iphoto, itunes, mail at the same time, it will make a huge difference.

 

[hayduke]

There are two answers:

1) (snarky) If you don't know if you need 8GB of RAM, then you don't need it.

2) Use the Activity Monitor.app to monitor your...um...activity. You can see how much ram you are using under different use conditions. If you are on a 4GB machine a regularly use most of the RAM then 8GB will likely help. If you rarely exceed 2 to ~3GB then the jump to 8GB is not likely to be noticeable.

 

[TheLonelyIsland]

My Geekbench points went up about 900 points from 4GB..

 

[elpmas]

if you got the money for 8gb of memory then do it. can't hurt

 

[cluthz]

My Geekbench points went up about 900 points from 4GB..

No you didn't.

My MBP gets 5600 with 4GB.
If you got 4700 with 64-bit Geekbench, then you did something really wrong.

 

[alphaod]

No you didn't.

My MBP gets 5600 with 4GB.
If you got 4700 with 64-bit Geekbench, then you did something really wrong.

Also, for obvious reasons, make sure you're testing with the 64-bit version of Geekbench on both configurations.

 

[shoppy]

I get about 5500+ whilst in 64 bit test average with 4gb of ram.