Questions about greater performance boost (gaming, otherwise)

[bwh318]

I love my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (base model), and I'm going to eventually be upgrading it to 16gb RAM and a 256gb SSD. I primarily use it for research and paper writing, and for these purposes it is more than sufficient. That said, I do occasionally use it for gaming, and I've noticed distinct slowdowns while I play and for a period of time after (mitigated by my recent install of smcFancontrol).

While I'm going to upgrade the ram and hard drive at some point, I can only do one now, and I'm wondering which will yield more appreciable benefits:

Going from 4gb ram to 16gb ram
or
Going from the standard 500gb hd to a good 256gb SSD.

 

[shanimal]

If anything, I think the upgrade in ram will help more with gaming. Dont get me wrong, going from a SSD to a HDD is a huge upgrade and you will see better load times, but you wont see higher fps. I put in a Crucial M4 in my 2011 MBP and when i loaded up WoW (only game I play on computer) is was at like 90fps consistently for a couple hours; then it dropped to normal (could have been because I reinstalled the OS on new drive). Also, when you in and out of dungeons and continents in WoW, there is a load screen. With the SSD installed I hardly have to wait. Its actually faster to right click the game in the dock and exit it, reopen, log in and switch characters then it is to log off and switch.

 

[snaky69]

I love my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (base model), and I'm going to eventually be upgrading it to 16gb RAM and a 256gb SSD. I primarily use it for research and paper writing, and for these purposes it is more than sufficient. That said, I do occasionally use it for gaming, and I've noticed distinct slowdowns while I play and for a period of time after (mitigated by my recent install of smcFancontrol).

While I'm going to upgrade the ram and hard drive at some point, I can only do one now, and I'm wondering which will yield more appreciable benefits:

Going from 4gb ram to 16gb ram
or
Going from the standard 500gb hd to a good 256gb SSD.

For gaming? Neither. Gaming is nearly 100% CPU and GPU dependant. More RAM will do you no good unless you're running out of it while gaming in the first place(which I doubt), and a faster hard drive will only make opening your game faster, that is all.

 

[Erasmus]

Use BootCamp, and overclock the graphics card. It's the only way of getting a decent speed boost in gaming.

 

[stevelam]

I love my mid-2012 MacBook Pro (base model), and I'm going to eventually be upgrading it to 16gb RAM and a 256gb SSD. I primarily use it for research and paper writing, and for these purposes it is more than sufficient. That said, I do occasionally use it for gaming, and I've noticed distinct slowdowns while I play and for a period of time after (mitigated by my recent install of smcFancontrol).

While I'm going to upgrade the ram and hard drive at some point, I can only do one now, and I'm wondering which will yield more appreciable benefits:

Going from 4gb ram to 16gb ram
or
Going from the standard 500gb hd to a good 256gb SSD.

neither will help with gaming.

 

[terraphantm]

neither will help with gaming.

Yes they will. 4GB is pretty low these days - even if a game doesn't use it by itself, most modern games will push the computer over the edge into the swap file.

And an SSD is a huge benefit in terms of loading times. In a lan setting, my system loads maps much faster than HDD systems.

 

[stevelam]

Yes they will. 4GB is pretty low these days - even if a game doesn't use it by itself, most modern games will push the computer over the edge into the swap file.

And an SSD is a huge benefit in terms of loading times. In a lan setting, my system loads maps much faster than HDD systems.

so you're going to suggest upgrading to ssd to help with gaming? please. obviously it would help in load times, but it doesn't help with actual gaming.

and most games aren't even 64-bit, so they can't even use more ram anyway. battlefield 3 can only use a max of 3gb of ram.

and further benchmarks showing ram barely makes any difference in performance for games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ram-memory-upgrade,2778-8.html