I have a 2.4 GHz Aluminum Macbook. Which upgrade would provide the most bang for my buck? I plan on doing both in time, but I am going to purchase as the money comes available, which wont be for a while. As I have to wait, what will help my machine the most first?
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Snow Leopard or 4GB RAM?
- Thread starter bc008
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You can never have enough RAM, and Snow Leopard will always be the same price.
Wait... DDR3 RAM prices will only go down...
Okay, wait to see the performance benefits of Snow Leopard and then weigh those with new RAM.
well depends what your are doing i suppose
what are your page in/page out ratio in activty monitor?
if its less than 10:1 I would get ram. if not, get SL
You really wont see much performance changes in Snow Leopard at all. Unless for some reason the developer version was purposely made the same speed as Leopard.
hmm. All very intriguing posts. I guess I will have to wait 4 days to see if people really notice a speed boost. I am going to purchase both in the end anyways, So I am not to worried, just wondering what you guys thought.
see, im debating to go SL on my hackintosh. there is SOME serenity with keeping it at leopard as i wont ever have to handle those "updates" from apple any more lol
then how come the general requirements say 1 GB of ram for SL but only 512mb for leopard
I don't think that matters as on a MB wouldn't its kernel in Snow Leopard automatically be 32-bit? There are a few threads stating that only certain models of Macs will actually support 64-bit kernels??? And, most Macs will be able to run 64-bit apps with 32-bit kernel. And memory allocation doesn't depend on kernel but rather on apps and CPU...
I don't really know for sure, but I do know that Snow Leopard requires 1 GB RAM whereas Leopard only required 512 MB... However, I think that Snow Leopard would better utilize it with 64-bit apps.
Back to the OP>>> it depends. Honestly, I doubt you're using your full 2 GB of RAM. Snow Leopard will make your MB faster for sure. You could use Activity Monitor and check how much RAM is allocated with your normal array of apps open... also check swap to see if too high (read about what should be using Google or this forum).
I would do Snow Leopard if it were me.
Good luck...
Right now, all INTEL (SL is NOT PPC Compatible) Macs support 64-bit (run CPU-x and look for "EMT64" if you dont beleive me), but the OS (Leopard, Tiger, etc) is all 32-bit. And you cannot run 64-bit apps on a 32-bit kernel. Not possible. You can run 32bit apps on a 64bit OS, but not the other way.
Wrong
Core 2 Duos Macs are 64-bit. Core Duos are 32-bit.
No Macs will run with the 64-bit kernel by default in Snow Leopard except the Xserve for compatibility reasons.
You can run 64-bit apps over the 32-bit kernel.
End of story.