archosman Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 I've maxed out my 2.4GHz laptop with 4 gigs of memory. OWC has a kit that will take it up to 6 gb. Would this be a waste of time and money or would it be a welcome addition? The laptop is rated up to 4gb, but they have tested the 6gb and said it works.
tkam Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 How expensive is it? Do you actually find yourself running low on memory? Is there a reason you think you need more memory, for example is something running slow or acting sluggish?
archosman Posted June 17, 2010 Author Report Posted June 17, 2010 $179. I notice that sometimes with Lightroom or Photoshop she gets sluggish. Same with FCP. I wish I had the money for a SSD.
Dusty Chalk Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 What operating system are you running? More than 4G is worthless on 32-bit operating systems, since it never gets addressed (I think that still applies to Macs).
Salt Peanuts Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 $179. I notice that sometimes with Lightroom or Photoshop she gets sluggish. Same with FCP. I wish I had the money for a SSD. Some of that is probably graphic card/chip, assuming you've got an integrated graphics. Lightroom definitely runs better on my (relatively) ancient iMac compared to my (newer compared to iiMac) MacBook, even though MacBook has more RAM, faster CPU, and faster HD.
tkam Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 A new HD might be a better idea, especially if the current one is only 5400rpm.
luvdunhill Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 hm. I might be looking to upgrade my mini memory, and heard rumors that you can stick 6G in it? Anyone know the exact model people have successfully used?
Beefy Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 Depending on the chipset on the motherboard, more memory may actually result in lower performance. Having three modules installed from 6Gb may prevent it from running in dual channel mode.
luvdunhill Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 Depending on the chipset on the motherboard, more memory may actually result in lower performance. Having three modules installed from 6Gb may prevent it from running in dual channel mode. Hm, that's debatable, right? Swapping to disk is much slower than degraded memory access time...
Dusty Chalk Posted June 17, 2010 Report Posted June 17, 2010 Leopard and Snow Leopard are 64 bit enough to take advantage of it.Which is why the first question was, which operating system was he running.
archosman Posted June 17, 2010 Author Report Posted June 17, 2010 Specs... 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT: Chipset Model: GeForce 8600M GT Type: GPU Western Digital 320 gig 7200rpm / 161 gigs free Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.4
Currawong Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 Click on the Apple Menu and select "About This Mac". Click on the "More info..." button in the window and the Apple System Profiler will open up. What "Model Identifier" do you get in it? From that, it's easy to find out online what your maximum memory options are.
Beefy Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 agreed, the dual channel advantage is quite minor Depending on the chipset, it can be a halving of bandwidth to install a third module to drop back to single channel addressing. So depending on the software you are using at the time, it can be significant.
mypasswordis Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 (edited) Check to see if you actually are maxing out your RAM and end up scratching onto the hard disk. It might be sluggish just due to not having enough processing power, either with the CPU or graphics card. You might even be maxing out the memory on your graphics card, though doubtful. Also check the speed of your RAM and the timings. Also make sure nothing is overheating. I hear that's a problem with MBP's and it'll definitely sap power. Edited June 19, 2010 by mypasswordis
episiarch Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 I have a MacBook Pro in this same category - only 4GB officially supported, but supposedly can go up to 6 with aftermarket help. I can attest that even with 4GB you can get into heavy memory swapping situations all too readily. (I do use Activity Monitor to see where all my memory and CPU cycles are going, etc.) But for me there's a big difference between the really heavy swapping situations where a program halts for seconds at a time and you get the spinning beachball cursor, and just general slowness. I still get the beachballs more often than I'd like, but I was able to cure a lot of the general slowness without adding more memory. Here's what helped: - iDefrag, an aftermarket defragmenter for OS X. The first run made a huge speed difference for me. Previously the free space on my drive was fragmented as hell, and iDefrag did a great job coalescing that as well as defragmenting fragmented files.* - NoScript, a Firefox add-on that keeps scripts from running on web pages unless you say it's okay. This took CPU use way down, because I tend to keep a bunch of tabs open and virtually all of them are running scripts, most of which I don't care about but which burn lots of cycles. - BarTab, a different Firefox add-on that quietly unloads browser tabs you haven't visited in a while. The tab's still there, still ready for you to click on it, it'll just take a second to reload its content when you do. This saves some memory, and also some CPU when BarTab unloads pages whose scripts you've whitelisted with NoScript. - BashFlash sits in my menu bar and lets me know if the Flash process has gone insane and needs to be put out of my misery. Between these measures I've gotten my Mac back to feeling fast and new again, and while going up to 6GB might be tempting some day, it's not tempting for me now. (What I'd probably do first is try moving virtual memory onto an ExpressCard/34 SSD, but we'll see when the time comes.) *Note: for maximum effectiveness you really want to boot off a separate drive rather than forcing iDefrag into its more limited "defragging a drive while you're using it" mode. This was easy for me since I use Super Duper to keep a nightly-updated bootable clone of my main drive that I could work off of while my internal drive was being defragged, but if you don't have this, be prepared for some downtime. A total defrag of my 320GB 7200RPM internal laptop drive took something like 12 hours.
Beefy Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 i've never seen it be significant, and he won't be installing a third module unless he glues it to the keyboard, so it's moot. Mismatched modules, ie 2Gb and 4Gb can have the same effect, depending on the chipset, and the effects it has depends on the applications you are running. But as MPI says, see if you are paging to disk first. If you aren't, you don't need MOAR RAMZ - that's all I'm saying
Dusty Chalk Posted June 19, 2010 Report Posted June 19, 2010 You could also see how much you're thrashing, if you aren't, then that's not the problem. As Al said.
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