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RAM: 8 vs 6 vs 4 gb ram mbp

R

r23w

macrumors member
Original poster
May 9, 2008
48
1
Will either 6 gb or 8 gb of ram boast much difference in a macbook pro over 4gb??

which is worth the money?

I do lots of hd video editing and tons of image processing.




thanks!
 
Surely took the words out of my mouth. While I love Apple, I wouldn't buy their RAM.

I've always used Crucial with no problems. I think anything from a name-brand company should be fine, save for value RAM.
 
Sorry for jumping the gun on you InvalidUserID! :p

It's truly amazing that Apple charges that much for friggin' RAM. But, I'm guessing enough people (who don't know as much as we do) are buying it from them to justify those prices.
 
If you install 6GB of RAM ( a 4GB and a 2GB) then your RAM will work in Single Channel mode. Your sticks must be the same to work in Dual Channel mode. Single channel mode will cause your computer to slow down.

As for 8GB vs. 4GB, you should use the general computer rule - buy what you need now. Next year it will be half price.
 
r23w said:
ive seen some places for under $300
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231210
Click to expand...

That won't work, that is DDR2 RAM, DDR3 will cost you a good deal more but you can still get it cheaper then from Apple.

I recommend you check activity monitor and see if you have a lot of pages out, if you don't, then you don't need more ram. Like I have 4GB and rarely ever have pages out, so adding more RAM would not help me.
 
Jaimi said:
If you install 6GB of RAM ( a 4GB and a 2GB) then your RAM will work in Single Channel mode. Your sticks must be the same to work in Dual Channel mode. Single channel mode will cause your computer to slow down.

As for 8GB vs. 4GB, you should use the general computer rule - buy what you need now. Next year it will be half price.
Click to expand...

I found the below quote here: http://forums.macnn.com/69/mac-notebooks/380886/6-8-gb-ram-macbook-pro/

BareFeats tested the unibody MBP with 6 GB and 4 GB. The goal was to find out if unmatched DIMMs would lead to a considerable performance decrease. What they found was that it didn't.

But of course if somebody has 4 GB and is paging out to disk he/she should get 6 GB immediately. Paging out to disk makes memory i/o orders of magnitude slower. Not 0.8% like the unmatched DIMMs, but something around a factor 1000. Obviously if 4 GB are enough you don't need to go unmatched. But if you page out at 4 GB, there is absolutely no reason not to go to 6 GB.

"The 6GB configuration produced essentially identical benchmark results to the 4GB configuration in our 2.8GHz MacBook Pro. The difference ranged from -.5% to +1.7% or an average difference of +.28% or less than 1/3 of one percent. I call that negligible. Or, in other words, you should have no worries about a speed penalty imposed by non-matching memory modules and loss of interleaving.
And when you consider the 6GB configuration potentially means less virtual memory swaps, then the only consideration is the cost. Maybe instead of ordering your MBP with the $500 128GB SSD, you should save your money for a 4GB memory module.
Looks like a winning combination to me. You can never be too thin, too rich, or have too much memory."
Click to expand...
 
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