3gb RAM upgrade on a macbook pro worth it?

stephen_nugent

stephen_nugent

Well-known member
hi,

i'm editing 720p material and keep on getting dropped frames on the timeline so i was thinking about upgrading my macbook pro core 2 duo to 3gb RAM. Strange i hear that the macbook pro performs better when the RAM is installed in identical pairs, so i heard that coming from the factory with 2x1gb the machine works at an optimum than replacing one of the 1gb slots with 2gb (making a total of mismatched 3gb). Anybody here did the upgrade to see better performance?

Also which brand do you recommend, samsung or micron?

many thanks,
stephen.
 
The general tone is the more RAM the better. I would get it. I edit 720P HDV currently on my Powerbook G4 with 2 Gigs of Ram. It works fine, but I can tell more RAM would help (and a quicker processor!).
 
How much RAM do you have now - 1 or 2 gb? I'm using a MacBook Pro with 2 gb and have never had a dropped frame in 720p DVCPRO-HD.
 
NeverColdCall said:
How much RAM do you have now - 1 or 2 gb? I'm using a MacBook Pro with 2 gb and have never had a dropped frame in 720p DVCPRO-HD.
Click to expand...

I got 2gb and true frank, theoretically i shouldnt have any problems. Maybe its an issue of disk fragmentation, looking into techtool pro or disk warrior, tho i understand the latter doesnt defrag. Other software like idefrag might do the job, new to apple system maintenance and gotta look a little more into all this. Any other precautions/suggestions?
 
I have heard from a few people that the extra chip of ram isn't all that worth it, the system is actually faster when ram is installed in pairs. so the odd chip out means that the system can't "RIAD" (for lack of a better description at the moment) the ram chips together, but instead, it treats them as seperate chips. So the system generally is faster with only 2 gigs, because it can pair them together. (again like splitting hard drives into a RAID format, but with RAM, it only works in pairs )

It would only be really beneficial if they let you put a 4th chip in. That way you can have 2 pairs. In the Mac Pro towers, its actually better to have 8GB split amoung edxactly 4 chips. The same amount of RAM split amoung 8 chips, or even 2 chips are not as effecient due to the way the system bus works. On the Mac Pros, 4 chips is the magic number, no matter how much ram there is. (well of course the more the better)

I hope i make sense in my explanation...?

Its pretty much the same way in either pcs or macs.
 
hmm, i see what you mean but these guys at http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html ran a test with not impressive but positive results:

"DO MATCHING PAIRS OF MEMORY HELP?
Though we ran the tests above using matching 1GB SODIMMs in both MacBook Pros (for a total of 2GB), we also ran the same tests in the 15" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with one 1GB SODIMM and one 2GB SODIMM for a total of 3GB of memory. We wanted to see if non-matched modules would cause the MacBook to slow down due to the loss of interleaving.

The answer is "no, it didn't slow down." In some cases we saw a gain in speed. An example is Aperture where the "lift and stamp" ran 11% faster with 3GB of RAM. But that's probably due to the fact that Aperture + OS X = more than 2GB of total memory usage."

So it seems that the system runs slightly faster if it is working in the range between 2 and 3gb of RAM. Less than that probably matched chips work better. So it probably all depends how memory hungry runs FCP in a given project. Correct me if i'm wrong.
 
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