Pro 13 ram upgrade one stick question

[david19801]

Hello,

I have a macbook pro 13 2012 with 4gb of ram. I want to upgrade to 16 someday but i want to see if i need less first.

Is it possible to buy just one 8gb stick and use it with the 4gb stick of ram to give me 12 gb ram? Someone told me this is a bad idea because of the channels...but I didn't understand him. is this true? Or will it really be the same as 12gb?

 

[GGJstudios]

Hello,

I have a macbook pro 13 2012 with 4gb of ram. I want to upgrade to 16 someday but i want to see if i need less first.

Is it possible to buy just one 8gb stick and use it with the 4gb stick of ram to give me 12 gb ram? Someone told me this is a bad idea because of the channels...but I didn't understand him. is this true? Or will it really be the same as 12gb?

Yes, you can certainly mix RAM sticks of different capacities.

• MR Guide to Buying RAM
• MR Guide to Understanding Intel Mac RAM
• MR Guide to Matched RAM on Intel Macs

 

[david19801]

One more question, how can I tell the macbook to use the 8gb first or will it know automatically which is best to use?

And final question. Will it see 8gb + 4gb as a total of 12gb or 8gb? I mean will it ignore the extra 4gb on the 8gb stick because it does not see that on the other stick?

 

[PapaVBnMOMO]

What u actually have in there is 2X2gb so u won't have 12 but 10.

 

[GGJstudios]

One more question, how can I tell the macbook to use the 8gb first or will it know automatically which is best to use?

And final question. Will it see 8gb + 4gb as a total of 12gb or 8gb? I mean will it ignore the extra 4gb on the 8gb stick because it does not see that on the other stick?

As PapaVBnMOMO said, your 4GB is composed of 2x2GB, so you'd remove one 2GB stick and replace it with one 8GB stick, giving you 10GB. No, it won't ignore any of the memory. You don't need to worry about how Mac OS X uses the available RAM, as it manages that automatically.