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Whch is more noticeable, more RAM or SSD

2

212rikanmofo

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 31, 2003
1,979
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I am torn between upgrading the ram on my soon to be iMac from 8gb to either 16gb or 32gb, or using the money to upgrade from a 1TB fusion drive to a 512GB SSD?

Which one would give me a big performance boost? I use the machine mostly for adobe creative apps and your typical, web, email, and casual gaming once in awhile.
 
Do you think 32GB would be good? I hate having page outs. I can always upgrade to a bigger SSD later when the prices drop, so I think getting ram now would be a better choice.
 
Well I maxed it out at 16GB, and only rarely get page outs. If your creative apps give you enough speed out of the Fusion drive, there's no compelling reason to spend big bucks on a pure SSD.
 
The most cost effective solution would be to add two 8GB modules for a total of 24GB.
 
212rikanmofo said:
I am torn between upgrading the ram on my soon to be iMac from 8gb to either 16gb or 32gb, or using the money to upgrade from a 1TB fusion drive to a 512GB SSD?

Which one would give me a big performance boost? I use the machine mostly for adobe creative apps and your typical, web, email, and casual gaming once in awhile.
Click to expand...
Memory.

drambuie said:
The most cost effective solution would be to add two 8GB modules for a total of 24GB.
Click to expand...
Excellent advice. And if it turns out 24GB isn't enough, the OP can always replace the original 8GB with a 16GB kit to max out the system. No money wasted whichever option turned out to meet their needs.
 
212rikanmofo said:
I am torn between upgrading the ram on my soon to be iMac from 8gb to either 16gb or 32gb, or using the money to upgrade from a 1TB fusion drive to a 512GB SSD?

Which one would give me a big performance boost? I use the machine mostly for adobe creative apps and your typical, web, email, and casual gaming once in awhile.
Click to expand...

Memory. The Fusion drive will e fine for what you're doing.
 
212rikanmofo said:
Do you think 32GB would be good? I hate having page outs. I can always upgrade to a bigger SSD later when the prices drop, so I think getting ram now would be a better choice.
Click to expand...

Interesting comment about 'hating page outs.' Do you actually notice them or is it some perception based on the number you get from Activity Monitor? And if you do notice your machine slowing on occasions, how do you know it's page outs and not Adobe going away and doing something for a while?

Better to take an holistic view, see where your speed/productivity problems are, in all respects (it might be you could be more productive by drinking less coffee, or more :)).

I know memory's cheap and fitting it is easy, but a couple of months down the road you could be no more productive than you are today and you'll be wondering why.
 
Unless you are working with some rather large files in Adobe, I doubt that you will even notice any difference between 8GB and more RAM...
 
I'd choose the SSD any day.

IIRC the 1 Tb Fusion has only 128mb of ssd, the rest of it is the standard hd, so it's easy to filled up, especially if you work with lots of big files.

Even swapping is not such a problem when you have an SSD, since it happens so fast it's not even noticeable.
 
Your most noticable boost would be from a dedicated SSD, no fusion malarkey.

That said while you're at it you may as well throw some more ram in there, it's dirt cheap now.

I put a 512GB SSD in my mini with 16gb ram, it's blitzing now, if an app takes more than a second to open I get annoyed :p
 
Cubytus said:
I thought the OP stated he was on a BUDGET. Seems to be a foreign word to you.
Click to expand...

Considering this choices that he offered, its not THAT much of a budget. If your going back and forth on parts that account for less than 20% total of the machines cost either your budget is stretched too thin already or you just want confirmation your choice was right
 
Cubytus said:
I thought the OP stated he was on a BUDGET. Seems to be a foreign word to you.
Click to expand...

My friends tell me the same thing :eek:

What I meant was ram is so cheap in the scheme of things it'd be worth throwing in the extra. Besides a 512gb SSD is WAY more than 16gb of ram.

Bang for buck it's still the SSD though
 
212rikanmofo said:
I use the machine mostly for adobe creative apps and your typical, web, email, and casual gaming once in awhile.
Click to expand...

Depends - as soon as I hear Adobe suite I think "hmm, these apps like to spread out in memory a little". Games will do that too as a general rule.

If you already have a Fusion drive, that tells me that the most often binaries will already have been pushed to the SSD portion, so probably most of your Adobe apps are already there. The performance gain in this case - and I'm just guessing since I can't see your activity monitor - would probably come from added memory.

Here's the rub - if ANY of your apps struggle with swap space, and you go pure SSD without giving them more breathing room in the way of RAM, that means that although it may seem a bit faster, it's hammering your SSD with the swaps every time it happens.

To me? I would say work on adding RAM as much as you can. If you feel compelled to add faster disk later, by the time you do that SSD's will have probably gone down in price more precipitously than RAM will have by then.

Just my $0.02

Ryan
 
LaunchpadBS said:
My friends tell me the same thing :eek:

What I meant was ram is so cheap in the scheme of things it'd be worth throwing in the extra. Besides a 512gb SSD is WAY more than 16gb of ram.

Bang for buck it's still the SSD though
Click to expand...
RAM is cheap, SSD is extremely expensive.
 
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