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Bigtree

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 7, 2007
332
110
Where should you see an improvement?

Just went from 2 to 4 gigs of rams and nothing has changed.

It's a first 24" Aluminum iMac. Even Photoshop doesn't run any better.:mad:
 
Nov 28, 2010
22,670
30
located
It depends on what kind of RAM usage you have and how big the files are you edit in PS.
You Mac will not be incredibly faster with more RAM, it will just page out (swap) less.
 

wpotere

Guest
Oct 7, 2010
1,528
1
Where should you see an improvement?

Just went from 2 to 4 gigs of rams and nothing has changed.

It's a first 24" Aluminum iMac. Even Photoshop doesn't run any better.:mad:


Ram doesn't increase speed. What it increases is the ability for the system to put more things in RAM rather than in swap. Ram is faster than swap (swap is located on the HD) so you will perceive this as faster response times especially if your system has to swap a lot. If your computer had plenty of ram available in the beginning, adding more won't do a thing for you and you won't see an increase in performance.
 

mutantteenager

macrumors 6502
Feb 26, 2006
258
0
You'll have to get your imac doing something intensive, like encoding or working on a RAW image in photoshop to see how the extra RAM helps.

If you weren't using your existing RAM to it's fullest prior to the upgrade, as other posters have said, you're unlikely to 'feel' the difference.
 

xkmxkmxlmx

macrumors 6502a
Apr 28, 2011
885
113
You won't always see speed gains, but sometimes you will. Depending on the intensity of the PS project, for instance.

While I was waiting for my ram to come for my latest iMac, I was at the stock 4GB. While, ok, I could see certain things hanging when I had a lot going on. I wouldn't dare try and push it, either.

Now that I have my 16, I see no drop in performance all while listening to music, encoding a video, have 18 browser tabs open, transferring large files from external AND encoding a photoshop file. All with random apps "open" but not being used.

Not faster, but *stronger*.
 
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