RAM upgrade question

[jtcdesigns]

Is there a tool or utility to check to see if adding 8GB of ram to my current 2GB ram will speed up my computer?

I currently have a 3 week old 8-core 2.8 mac pro. Before I had a G5 with 8GB ram and I could open up many of my RAW images from my camera at once without noticing an uber amount of lag time. I noticed once getting the new mac pro with 2GB ram it took longer to load up the images. Now I'd think it would use processor power more than the ram but I could be wrong. I always set photoshop to use the most amount of ram which is around 3GB plus I could run safari and dreamweaver, illustrator and some other apps all at once without wanting to toss my computer out the window for lag. (I have little patience btw)

So I was just talking with someone saying that if I add 8GB of ram its overkill for me to have 10GB ram. Though I also plan on running a virtual machine that will run a couple design apps that are windows only.. plus I use maya... but besides that. If it were 10GB or ram I have and its all to just run my browser, adobe design suite and maybe a couple chat clients it may be over kill but wouldn't I be right in saying that they would all run smooth all at once using 10GB of ram instead of 2? and yes I know its only 32 bit so each can only suck up 3GB ram. Just figured to me I could run many apps and have no issue with my computer with more ram. I found online 2 4GB sticks of ram and I plan on getting them this year so even though im buying them.. just wanted some input.

 

[apple2E]

Is there a tool or utility to check to see if adding 8GB of ram to my current 2GB ram will speed up my computer?

I currently have a 3 week old 8-core 2.8 mac pro. Before I had a G5 with 8GB ram and I could open up many of my RAW images from my camera at once without noticing an uber amount of lag time. I noticed once getting the new mac pro with 2GB ram it took longer to load up the images. Now I'd think it would use processor power more than the ram but I could be wrong. I always set photoshop to use the most amount of ram which is around 3GB plus I could run safari and dreamweaver, illustrator and some other apps all at once without wanting to toss my computer out the window for lag. (I have little patience btw)

So I was just talking with someone saying that if I add 8GB of ram its overkill for me to have 10GB ram. Though I also plan on running a virtual machine that will run a couple design apps that are windows only.. plus I use maya... but besides that. If it were 10GB or ram I have and its all to just run my browser, adobe design suite and maybe a couple chat clients it may be over kill but wouldn't I be right in saying that they would all run smooth all at once using 10GB of ram instead of 2? and yes I know its only 32 bit so each can only suck up 3GB ram. Just figured to me I could run many apps and have no issue with my computer with more ram. I found online 2 4GB sticks of ram and I plan on getting them this year so even though im buying them.. just wanted some input.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm?page=/Benchmarks/macproearly08ram/article.html

This article should help you see the performance gains from adding certain combo's of ram.

 

[jtcdesigns]

riser

So I checked out the link and it mentioned upper and lower riser.... im used to a computer just having the slots on the main board but this has 2 cards that pull out. Like before you could only add ram in pairs but was this saying I could add ram to just one of the cards? Which I think it said would give me worse performance.

 

[TrapOx]

2GB is nowhere near enough. Even my 3 year old G5 uses all of the 5.5GB ram I put in it (426mb free at the moment).

Leopard is designed to take advantage of every MB of RAM it has access to for boosting performance.

 

[Rt&Dzine]

Like before you could only add ram in pairs but was this saying I could add ram to just one of the cards? Which I think it said would give me worse performance.

Yes, if you put pairs of either 1GBs or 2GBs on one riser with nothing on the other riser, the performance will suffer according to their tests.

Since you have the 8-core machine, you'll get the best performance if you have 4 matching sticks of RAM with upper and lower pairs matching.

There are 2 issues--speed of RAM and amount of RAM. These tests are about the speed of the RAM’s throughput.

But the more RAM you have, the more applications you can run, and some applications can take advantage of more RAM (I think Photoshop).

 

[NightSailor]

Adding memory

Put the two 4GB memory boards in the first two slots.
Then put the other two 1GB boards in the next pair of slots, or sell them.

I have 16 GB of RAM in my Mac Pro and I've never had a page out. I tried loading the system up and never got it above 9GB.

8 GB will work fine, the extra two won't hurt, but you might be better off selling the 2 1GB memory boards while you can.

Or, you can get two more 1 GB boards, for a total of 12GB and you would have all the benefits of the dual channel memory architecture. It would make the machine a tiny bit faster if you exceeded 8GB. And like me you would never have an Page Outs.