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Most beneficial upgrade?

S

Shelton

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 16, 2008
39
0
Hello,

I am loving my new Mac Pro. I am kind of pissed that I didn’t switch to a Mac sooner, but that is water under the bridge. I literally cringe on the rare occasions I have to boot into XP.

The Mac Pro is great, but there are a couple areas that are a little lacking. Thankfully, they are very easily upgradable: the ram and hard drive. I bought my Mac Pro with the stock 2GB of ram and a 500GB Hard Drive. I only have the money to upgrade one of the two right now (I am a poor college kid), and I am not sure which to upgrade.

The 500GB hard drive is atrociously slow. It usually scores in the 40s in Xbench (My 7 year old Western Digital scores about the same), and it significantly slows the loading of applications. The 2GB of ram is decent; I don’t max it out often, but sometimes I do with very heavy multitasking. I don’t use many design or pro-apps, but I do run several reasonably memory hungry programs (100-250 megs of ram per program).

My question is: would it be better to get another 2GB of ram or a fast hard drive like the new 640GB Western Digital? Which would see the biggest performance increase? I had read that getting 4 pairs of ram dimms can increase general speed in the Mac Pro? Is there any truth to that?


Thanks!
 
RAM - the reason your hard drive is slow is because the system lack RAM and use your hard drive for swapping.
 
Not to go against what everyone else here has said...

From personal experience... I replaced the stock 320 Gig hdd with a Hitachi 1TB 32 Meg Cache version... BEFORE I added 2 more gigs to the Stock HDD...

And I can honestly say there was a larger performance improvement (boot times, app load times, overall system responsiveness) with the HDD replacement than with the extra 2 gigs of ram.

However, I find I can do much more at once (virtual machines, encoding media, etc. etc.) with the 4 gigs than with the 2.

Just my experience!
 
Another vote for more RAM. If nothing more buy 2 X 1GB sticks now to fill slots 1 & 2 in both risers. Then when you get more $ you can buy 4 X 2GB. At that time put the 4 X 2GB in slots 1 & 2 in both risers and move the 4 X 1GB into slots 3 & 4 of both risers for a total of 12GB.
 
I actually just got a little unexpected cash. I am going to get both! Yay!
 
Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet.

I'm really happy with the Hitachi, for what it's worth.

I also hear that the Spinpoint F1s are pretty speedy!

Happy shopping! :apple:
 
RAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:eek:

ram3.jpg
 
Shelton said:
I actually just got a little unexpected cash. I am going to get both! Yay!
Click to expand...
Way to go!

If you could only do one thing, I would have concurred with all the previous posters that suggested to get more RAM. The thing is that more RAM will reduce your dependency on a (fast) hard drive, because far less memory swapping is needed.

- Martin
 
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