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RAM upgrade on MBP

D

dgrog

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 30, 2012
44
9
I recently bought a new 15inch MBP mid-2012 model.

I got 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory as I though that'd be plenty! But apparently not - machine seems quite sluggish at times and often just goes down to a few MBs of RAM free.

Two questions...
1) Would it be worth upgrading to 8GB of RAM? Would I notice the difference?
2) Where would I buy the RAM (in UK) and what RAM would you recommend?

Many thanks
 
dgrog said:
I recently bought a new 15inch MBP mid-2012 model.

I got 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3 memory as I though that'd be plenty! But apparently not - machine seems quite sluggish at times and often just goes down to a few MBs of RAM free.

Two questions...
1) Would it be worth upgrading to 8GB of RAM? Would I notice the difference?
2) Where would I buy the RAM (in UK) and what RAM would you recommend?

Many thanks
Click to expand...
1) It depends, have you actually monitored your RAM usage using Activity Monitor? Take a look at page in's and page out's, what is it displaying? A new mac's drive will index itself in the first few hours and the computer will initially appear sluggish because of that. Upgrading RAM if you aren't actually running out of it will not improve performance whatsoever.

2) I suggest amazon, they have pretty decent prices and shipping is quick.
 
Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used after a day of typical usage and report back.

If you have page outs greater than 1 GB, you can benefit from more RAM.

1. Yes and yes, if Activity Monitor shows you a lot of page outs, it only costs 50 GBP or so to upgrade to 8 GB RAM and probably less than 100 GBP to upgrade to 16 GB.
2. Corsair or Crucial or any other national electronics retail store you have in the UK.

----------
snaky69 said:
1) Take a look at page in's and page out's
Click to expand...

Page ins are not really relevant.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used after a day of typical usage and report back.

If you have page outs greater than 1 GB, you can benefit from more RAM.

1. Yes and yes, it only costs 50 GBP or so to upgrade to 8 GB RAM and probably less than 100 GBP to upgrade to 16 GB.
2. Corsair or Crucial or any other national electronics retail store you have in the UK.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies.

Is it possible to tell the maximum amount of RAM my MBP can have? When buying online the only option I had was to upgrade from 4 to 8 - could it hold more?
 
dgrog said:
Brilliant thanks. I'll keep an eye on activity monitor over the next few days to see if I really need the extra RAM.

Just out of curiosity, what are 'page outs'?

Thanks for all your help :)
Click to expand...

Second link in post #3 or amount of data copied from RAM to HDD/SSD in order to free RAM for current activity.
 
simsaladimbamba said:
Open Activity Monitor and go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used after a day of typical usage and report back.

If you have page outs greater than 1 GB, you can benefit from more RAM.

1. Yes and yes, if Activity Monitor shows you a lot of page outs, it only costs 50 GBP or so to upgrade to 8 GB RAM and probably less than 100 GBP to upgrade to 16 GB.
2. Corsair or Crucial or any other national electronics retail store you have in the UK.

----------



Page ins are not really relevant.
Click to expand...

Been using my mac quite heavily (importing stuff into iMovie, using iTunes, safari, video converter) for the last 4 hours (restarted so page outs would be zero) and currently have just over 2GB of page outs.

I guess this suggests I need more RAM? Also, would you recommend upgrading to 8GB or going further and getting 16? Would I see much of a speed increase between 8 and 16?

Thanks again for all yout help :)
 
dgrog said:
Been using my mac quite heavily (importing stuff into iMovie, using iTunes, safari, video converter) for the last 4 hours (restarted so page outs would be zero) and currently have just over 2GB of page outs.

I guess this suggests I need more RAM? Also, would you recommend upgrading to 8GB or going further and getting 16? Would I see much of a speed increase between 8 and 16?

Thanks again for all yout help :)
Click to expand...

8 GB should suffice for now. 16 GB might not help you at all with your stated page outs.
 
8GB was fine for me until I started using Aperture, which ate through that pretty quickly. General day to day use 8GB is fine, but i always like to max out my ram. It's fairly cheap and will last you the life of the laptop (in general). A lot of people max out their ram as soon as they buy their MacBooks (pros, airs, retinas) and now as SSD's are dropping in price people are upgrading them frequently too.
 
dgrog said:
Been using my mac quite heavily (importing stuff into iMovie, using iTunes, safari, video converter) for the last 4 hours (restarted so page outs would be zero) and currently have just over 2GB of page outs.

I guess this suggests I need more RAM? Also, would you recommend upgrading to 8GB or going further and getting 16? Would I see much of a speed increase between 8 and 16?

Thanks again for all yout help :)
Click to expand...

OP you and I are in the exact same boat,same MBP and same issue with RAM. I'm usually in the 2GB of pages outs neighborhood daily. Gonna upgrade to 8gb cause my machine seriously lags
 
If you have the cMBP it's okay that you went with 4GB, as it's an expandable laptop and you could always add aftermarket RAM as you intend. Try out 8GB as it is cheap and see if that is enough for you and if not then upgrade to 16GB. You could always even keep the 8GB as reusable parts.
 
dgrog said:
Been using my mac quite heavily (importing stuff into iMovie, using iTunes, safari, video converter) for the last 4 hours (restarted so page outs would be zero) and currently have just over 2GB of page outs.

I guess this suggests I need more RAM? Also, would you recommend upgrading to 8GB or going further and getting 16? Would I see much of a speed increase between 8 and 16?

Thanks again for all yout help :)
Click to expand...

Browsing and listening to music? How is that heavy usage at all? Obviously if you're converting video at the same time and importing stuff into iMovie, any machine is going to start stuttering because those processes will pretty much use 100% resources of ANY machine.

And more ram wont even help you anyway seeing as video conversion is mostly CPU intensive.
 
For the relatively small price-difference (as a proportion of the cost of the machine), I'd go straight to 16Gb. You probably won't benefit right now unless you use virtual machines, but RAM usage is only going to increase with new OSX and app versions.
 
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