So I had the standard 2gb Ram with my Macbook pro, and the score came out at 3014, with 2378 memory score. Then I installed the new Ram for a total of 4GB and the score went to 3080 with a memory score of 2373, 5 points less than before. What gives?
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Not sure I understand geekbench scores after adding new RAM>>
- Thread starter Anonymouslives
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Methinks you are attributing WAAAY too much accuracy to the benchmark if you think a quarter of one percent difference in score is significant.
Adding RAM doesn't always have an effect on the score. If the latency of the memory is the same, and you're going from 2GB to 4GB, it shouldn't really affect the score at all. I don't think any of Geekbench's exercises run the memory through any intensive tests that utilize over 2GB to begin with. Mostly it hammers the memory with page ins/outs, generally only utilizing up to 1.5GB of the memory. If you went from 512MB to 1GB you would see a large difference, but not from 2GB to 4GB. The small variations you are seeing in the score could be attributed to minor variations you will see every time you run the bench mark. I've seen benchmarks run on the same rig three times in the same week with no changes made and produce three slightly different scores. Anything less than a 1% variation in benchmark scores is negligible at best.
Yeah, I don't have a problem admitting that I have no idea what the benchmark scores mean in the first place. It's just the only thing I know to do to check system performance where you get a score. I think it's more than reasonable to have assumed double the amount of Ram would have had an effect on the numbers.
You were thinking along the right lines. If you had a small amount of ram and doubled it the scores would be dramatically different, but once you get up to 2GB and higher you don't affect benchmarks much. You will notice vastly improved performance though if you do any memory intensive work like video editing, or working simultaneously on a large number of high res images in photoshop.
Increasing RAM doesn't make a computer faster. However, adding RAM to a computer thats running a programs that have used all its RAM, which is then at the point of swapping out to disk (which will show as page outs), will improve performance.
Most benchmarking programs don't care how much RAM you have. However, the scores will likely reflect how fast your RAM is since RAM is used to perform the floating-point calculations, etc.