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MBP - more RAM?

smartalic34

smartalic34

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 16, 2006
977
61
USA
I have a core duo MBP with 1 GB of RAM (2x512MB)... it runs fine, but when I play some basic games (flightgear flight sim, other games of similar requirements), all of my RAM gets eaten up, and when I go to load safari after playing, things are very slow. should I get more RAM even though I only notice slowdowns after playing games? things run reasonably well when I have ichat, safari, pages, and itunes open, but I can't do more than that. even though I wouldnt need the extra GB all the time, is it worth it?

after playing the flightsim, my page in/out: 466,143/436,238

if it is worth it, is this what I should get?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148086

any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks!
 
A year ago when I bought my MacBook, I bought a 1GB stick for about $95, bringing me up to 1.25GB. Amazing to see how much RAM prices have dropped since then. Now there's 2x 1GB sticks for $40! I wouldn't have liked to waited this long on 512MB though.

Anyways, to answer your question: Yes. You can never have too much RAM. ;)
 
well if theres still a speed issue a while after quitting the game, it means the game is still occupying memory for some reason, and it shouldn't. this is bad programming. more ram probably wouldnt make too much difference in this case, because the game would fill up the new ram, and not empty it afterwards same as before, and you'd have the same issue.

sidenote: do you have enough empty hard drive space? you should have about 10gigs empty at a time.
 
chaos86 said:
well if theres still a speed issue a while after quitting the game, it means the game is still occupying memory for some reason, and it shouldn't. this is bad programming. more ram probably wouldnt make too much difference in this case, because the game would fill up the new ram, and not empty it afterwards same as before, and you'd have the same issue.

sidenote: do you have enough empty hard drive space? you should have about 10gigs empty at a time.
Click to expand...

I think what could be happening is the RAM has been freed, but it isn't assigned to any apps, and the slowness is caused by the assigning of the RAM to safari, ichat, etc... I have about 35GB free of HD space
 
smartalic34 said:
I think what could be happening is the RAM has been freed, but it isn't assigned to any apps, and the slowness is caused by the assigning of the RAM to safari, ichat, etc... I have about 35GB free of HD space
Click to expand...

yeah but as soon as it is freed, the other apps in need should be free to take it as needed. how long does it take for safari, etc to get up to normal speed?
 
it takes a couple minutes to get safari up to speed... or if I open, close, open, close safari after loading my home page, it'll take maybe 5 or 6 cycles of this to load with only 1 bounce
 
My MBP came with 2G and I recently upgraded to 3G. For me there is a noticable improvement moving from 1G to 2G in normal every day tasks. If you run more tha a couple of applications at once, or memory intensive tasks like Photoshop, or any Rosetta apps, then the more memory you can get the better.

I was shocked how cheap memory is now. I picked up a 2G DIMM for less than $50 - well worth the investment.

Your paging stats show that your machine is swapping - copying memory out to disk when it needs more, which slows things down considerably. Unless you are running something with a memory leak, then you would definitely benefit from additional memory...
 
Just did the same upgrade myself. Even the same RAM when it was onsale at Frys. Very noticeable while running VMWare.
 
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