Question about ram upgrade

[edwinDigital]

I have MBP 13" 2.7 (new owner) and I want to upgrade the RAM from 4gb to 8gb..
1. Is the VRAM will upgrade also to 512?
2. Is upgrading the RAM will resolve the issue of spinning beach ball of death?

 

[kasakka]

Do you run virtual machines? If not, you won't benefit much from 8 Gb.

Answer to both questions is no.

 

[edwinDigital]

thanks for the reply..... im not using VM, I use my MBP mainly in image editing via LR3 and CS5....

 

[hafr]

What you should do is to open Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor), click on System Memory and look at Page outs. If it's anything other than 0, it means that since you last rebooted your computer, at at least one point you ran out of RAM.

If it's increasing as you're looking at it whilst doing your everyday stuff, it means you're out of RAM and that an upgrade could be worth the 50 bucks.

 

[edwinDigital]

thanks dude i owe you bigtime....

 

[eternalife]

Do you run virtual machines? If not, you won't benefit much from 8 Gb.

Answer to both questions is no.

I kindly disagree. Especially since he is using LR3 and CS5. Absolutely get the RAM. I'm running with 8GB and still page out sometimes.

 

[edwinDigital]

@ eternallife if I upgrade to 8GB it will improve the performance of CS5? btw thanks for reply......

 

[416049]

Do you run virtual machines? If not, you won't benefit much from 8 Gb.

Answer to both questions is no.

I am sorry but this is wrong there are a couple of threads confirming that the vram gets increased to 512mb as their is more to share from 8gb ram. It will only slightly increase in performance.

8gb is also good for multitasking like running lot of apps at once or aperture and adobe cs5 will speed up as well.

 

[edwinDigital]

I am sorry but this is wrong there are a couple of threads confirming that the vram gets increased to 512mb as their is more to share from 8gb ram. It will only slightly increase in performance.

8gb is also good for multitasking like running lot of apps at once or aperture and adobe cs5 will speed up as well.

thanks dude now I'm upgrading..... one more thing is any brand will do as long as it is DDR3 1333mhz? its kinda pricey in apple store..

 

[AndreyATC]

thanks dude now I'm upgrading..... one more thing is any brand will do as long as it is DDR3 1333mhz? its kinda pricey in apple store..

Newegg sells good veriety of RAM at very good price
I went with Crucial 8Gb kit, it was simple plug-n-play for me
Some members go with less expencieve brands
But they're all range in $30-50 for 8gb

 

[416049]

thanks dude now I'm upgrading..... one more thing is any brand will do as long as it is DDR3 1333mhz? its kinda pricey in apple store..

Yes and No, I recommend buying branded ram like Kingston,Crucial,OWC,Hydrial are fine don't buy very cheap non branded one. and you don't have to buy from the apple store

 

[edwinDigital]

Thanks for the input everybody.........

 

[edwinDigital]

I just upgraded my ram to 8gb and it did increase my VRAM from 384 shared to 512 dedicated! yeahbah! Thanks to you people!

 

[snaky69]

I just upgraded my ram to 8gb and it did increase my VRAM from 384 shared to 512 dedicated! yeahbah! Thanks to you people!

Since the intel 3000 HD is crappy anyway, you will not notice any difference in performance with the added memory, as that isn't its bottleneck. If you expected better gaming performance, you'll be disappointed.

 

[edwinDigital]

Since the intel 3000 HD is crappy anyway, you will not notice any difference in performance with the added memory, as that isn't its bottleneck. If you expected better gaming performance, you'll be disappointed.

I don't use my MBP for games ( i'm too old for that) I use it mainly for browsing and photo editing thru cs5 and LR

 

[snaky69]

I don't use my MBP for games ( i'm too old for that) I use it mainly for browsing and photo editing thru cs5 and LR

There's no such thing as too old

 

[hafr]

I just upgraded my ram to 8gb and it did increase my VRAM from 384 shared to 512 dedicated! yeahbah! Thanks to you people!

How do you see if the video RAM is dedicated or shared? If I go to About this Mac > More info it says "Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB". I assume it's shared since I haven't done any changes to the hardware, but how do you know that the video RAM is dedicated after the upgrade?

 

[edwinDigital]

How do you see if the video RAM is dedicated or shared? If I go to About this Mac > More info it says "Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 384 MB". I assume it's shared since I haven't done any changes to the hardware, but how do you know that the video RAM is dedicated after the upgrade?

After installing the 8 gb RAM go to about this mac>more info> graphic/display and you will see this:

VRAM (Total): 512 MB

cheers!

 

[hafr]

After installing the 8 gb RAM go to about this mac>more info> graphic/display and you will see this:

VRAM (Total): 512 MB

cheers!

So it no longer says "Intel HD Graphics"? And I'm not really sure how you can tell whether it's shared or dedicated by this information... What am I missing?

 

[edwinDigital]

So it no longer says "Intel HD Graphics"? And I'm not really sure how you can tell whether it's shared or dedicated by this information... What am I missing?

graphics/displays info after upgrading from 4gb to 8 gb RAM:

Intel HD Graphics 3000

Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x0126
Revision ID: 0x0009
Displays:
Color LCD:
Resolution: 1280 x 800
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes

 

[hafr]

graphics/displays info after upgrading from 4gb to 8 gb RAM:

Intel HD Graphics 3000

Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: Intel (0x8086)
Device ID: 0x0126
Revision ID: 0x0009
Displays:
Color LCD:
Resolution: 1280 x 800
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes

It's identical (except for 384 vs. 512) to the information I have. You claimed that your VRAM went from 384 shared to 512 dedicated. What I'm asking is how you know that the VRAM is now dedicated

 

[heisenberg123]

What you should do is to open Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor), click on System Memory and look at Page outs. If it's anything other than 0, it means that since you last rebooted your computer, at at least one point you ran out of RAM.

If it's increasing as you're looking at it whilst doing your everyday stuff, it means you're out of RAM and that an upgrade could be worth the 50 bucks.

my outs are like 800KBs, i suppose thats not enough reason to need more RAM?

 

[RedRaven571]

There's no such thing as too old

+1

I am 50+ and still play games....

 

[416049]

It's identical (except for 384 vs. 512) to the information I have. You claimed that your VRAM went from 384 shared to 512 dedicated. What I'm asking is how you know that the VRAM is now dedicated

hey, it is still shared but because it is 8gb of ram, more ram will be allocated to the graphics card... does this make sense?

 

[Tee2eye]

Just put in my order for the 8GB kit from OWC, as well as a MiniDisplayport to HDMI adapter to game on my TV Got next day delivery, so hopefully itll be here tomorow so I can game some BF3 on my 22 inch!

Boy, I love my MBP.