upgrading ram question

[evanrousso]

I just got a macbook, the 512mb of ram it came with just isnt cutting it. I was going to buy another 1gb of ram. I have been told by a few people that it isnt good to have two different brands of ram in your machine. It is best to get a 1gb kit or a 2gb kit not 1gb of one kind of ram and 512 of the stock ram. I have been told that this can result in some system problems. Is this true?

 

[Aperture]

There are multiple threads on this already, I think it doesn't matter much though what brand you have or even if it is matched. Some people may tell you otherwise, though.

Hope this helps!

 

[evanrousso]

yeah, i dont see why it would matter. Maybe this is an issue thats exclusive to a windows machine

 

[richard4339]

If you go into the Apple stores, they almost always have 1.5gb of ram... with 2 DIMMS, that means they're not matching.

If there's a MBP update to 64bit, it will then be more important to have matching RAM.

 

[WildCowboy]

You will see a performance boost if you use matched pairs of RAM. This effect is most pronounced in machines like the MacBook that use integrated graphics, but it's still not huge. What is means is that a 2 GB kit of identical RAM sticks (2 x 1 GB sticks) will run faster than 2 x 1 GB purchased from different vendors.

But there is nothing inherently wrong with running RAM from two different vendors in your MacBook. You can add a 1 GB stick from a third-party vendor and your MacBook will run just fine...the performance boost will be amazing.

The thing to remember is that more RAM is more important than matching RAM. If you had a choice between 1.5 GB unmatched (1 GB + 512 MB) and 1 GB matched (2 x 512 MB), the 1.5 GB option will still be faster...by quite a bit.

 

[discounteggroll]

tons of people are selling their single 512 MBP sticks on ebay, id check it out