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How much RAM is enough?

post #1 of 54
1/31/04 at 6:20pm
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How much ram do you consider enough. Average user? Power user?

I'd say 512 MB for novices, but at today's prices 1 GB is accessible to all. Power users should start at 1 GB and move up from there. My G5 has 1.5 GB. Now that I'm watching, if I see the Activity Monitor reporting little free RAM I must buy more.

You?
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post #2 of 54
1/31/04 at 6:34pm
i think 2GB is plenty for basically everyone.

edit: 512 for average users, 2GB for power.
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post #3 of 54
1/31/04 at 6:49pm
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8GB


But since no apps can address more than 2GB at the moment 8GB is overkill
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post #4 of 54
1/31/04 at 6:59pm
4 GBs for me cuz i do alot of video editing
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post #5 of 54
1/31/04 at 7:02pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Leonis
But since no apps can address more than 2GB at the moment 8GB is overkill

Not overkill!!

That means you can only run 4 apps with 2 GB each. Let the system give Photoshop a couple gigs, C4D a gig, Final Cut Pro a gig, etc. if you're a heavy heavy user and you could "easily" use up all that memory.

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post #6 of 54
1/31/04 at 7:37pm
I have 320Mb and when I check RAM usage I always seem to have about 30Mb free no matter what I do. I may up it to 512 Mb as soon as I see a sale on memory.
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post #7 of 54
1/31/04 at 7:44pm
Quote:
I have 320Mb and when I check RAM usage I always seem to have about 30Mb free no matter what I do. I may up it to 512 Mb as soon as I see a sale on memory.

But even if you upgrade to 512, you would probably still have 30 Mb left. OS X will use as mush as it can, which is a good thing.
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post #8 of 54
1/31/04 at 7:55pm
k squared is right.

The OS will *always* keep 10-30 MB free no matter what is running. It holds this as an emergency slot for the kernel or other key system tasks.

Also, he's right that the OS will always use up as much as you have. Mac OS X caches things left and right to make your experience faster. It does, though, automatically free up cached data if another app needs memory. It's all done automatically and makes the system run much more faster.

This is why, for example, some apps will launch faster the second time they're opened. It's because part of the app is still retained in memory.
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post #9 of 54
1/31/04 at 8:04pm
good info. Everything seems to be running pretty snappy so Im going to stay pat for now. I also dont want to have to install RAM right now because I have a loose screw in my iMac and I dont want to have to tip the sucker over to install any more.
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post #10 of 54
1/31/04 at 9:03pm
while we're on the subject... where can i get reliable, "cheap" ram from a third party for the g5? also, will anything change with the rev. b's? i hear apple's prices are a bit high...
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post #11 of 54
1/31/04 at 9:04pm
Hm, looking at top, I have 560MB active, all RAM used (1G) for caching, and currently running bunches of programs open (doing some programming stuff now), so I'd say 1G is good for most users who actually do stuff with computers. I think for the simple web/mail/word processing crowd, 256MB is usable, 512MB most needed. For the video/photoshop users, 1G+ is probably needed.
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post #12 of 54
1/31/04 at 9:11pm
Quote:
Originally posted by ipodandimac
while we're on the subject... where can i get reliable, "cheap" ram from a third party for the g5?

http://www.crucial.com

http://www.ramjet.com
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post #13 of 54
1/31/04 at 9:20pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Brad
http://www.crucial.com

http://www.ramjet.com

Neither of those two are particularly cheap...

One can go to http://www.newegg.com/ , http://zipzoomfly.com/ , etc. to get better RAM for less.
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post #14 of 54
1/31/04 at 9:57pm
  • Leonis
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brad
http://www.crucial.com

http://www.ramjet.com

Also Other World Computing http://www.macsales.com

I have bought over 1000 dollars of RAM from the in the past and I have zero problems
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post #15 of 54
1/31/04 at 10:00pm
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I just got some of this in the mail and it is working great. $147 bucks too. I ran Tech Tool Pro to check the ram and fond nothing wrong.
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post #16 of 54
1/31/04 at 10:03pm
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brad
Not overkill!!

That means you can only run 4 apps with 2 GB each. Let the system give Photoshop a couple gigs, C4D a gig, Final Cut Pro a gig, etc. if you're a heavy heavy user and you could "easily" use up all that memory.



Actually Photoshop only can use 1785MB of RAM, not even 2GB

Final Cut Pro. Right now I can see it eats no more than 1 GB RAM.

Cinema 4D..... in general rendering takes no more than 400MB. On the biggest scene I worked on....rendering takes roughly 1.1GB RAM. But this is no good because when the app eats up this much of RAM that means you are working on a overly big scene. You really need to break down the scenes to smaller chunks and render them separately and combined all the rendered clips together in After Effects. If not the app will just crrrrrraaaaaaasssssshhhhhhh.

After Effects....there's one time I saw it going full 2GB (on my friend's G5). That's a NTSC resolution with over 15 layers doing RAM preview
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post #17 of 54
1/31/04 at 11:18pm
For the current Apple line-up (expect the G5).. I suggest you to MAX it out.

For the G5.. if you can afford it.. feel free to drop 8GB of RAM in it.
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post #18 of 54
2/1/04 at 7:43am
Quote:
Originally posted by ipodandimac
while we're on the subject... where can i get reliable, "cheap" ram from a third party for the g5? also, will anything change with the rev. b's? i hear apple's prices are a bit high...

www.dealram.com
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post #19 of 54
2/3/04 at 2:25pm
Put as much as you can afford in it. This is always the best suggestion. 8)
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post #20 of 54
2/4/04 at 11:15am
I just got my 256 Apple chip to install today, now I'll finally have 512 and it should help with the OS, DV editing, and everything else. Should I notice a big improvement going from 256 in OS X to 512?
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post #21 of 54
2/4/04 at 12:42pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Messiahtosh
I just got my 256 Apple chip to install today, now I'll finally have 512 and it should help with the OS, DV editing, and everything else. Should I notice a big improvement going from 256 in OS X to 512?

u should notice a big improvement-OS X loves RAM!!!

what computer do you have? i'm asking because my friend has a G5 and it originally had only 256 MB, and it was still plenty fast, then he got 1 GB put in, and, WOW
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post #22 of 54
2/4/04 at 12:52pm
Quote:
Originally posted by mattjohndrow
u should notice a big improvement-OS X loves RAM!!!

what computer do you have? i'm asking because my friend has a G5 and it originally had only 256 MB, and it was still plenty fast, then he got 1 GB put in, and, WOW

My equipment is in my sig...but iMac G4 800 Mhz, Supa'drive and went from 256 to 512 MB of RAM....I havent put it in yet, it shipped to my Dad's office but I'll have it when hes home from work, ya!
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post #23 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:04pm
I went from 256 to 768 on my TiBook and the difference was astounding! At the time OS X was taking 253 of 256MB and that was just after login with no apps running!
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post #24 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:06pm


I am just really hoping 512 covers me for the remainder of my usage of this iMac. I'll be doing video editing, iphoto, and GarageBand (though even G5's struggle with that to an extent). I will just enjoy being able to know that I can do my work without having to see the beach ball.
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post #25 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:15pm
M'tosh,

I can do all that (and more! ) with my stock 1.25GHz AlBook. I know GB can be a hog but I've worked with up to 12 track songs and haven't had any errors pop up. These tracks were a mix of MIDI and audio files. Maybe I'm just lucky *shrug*.
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post #26 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:16pm
So do the 64 bit processors address only up to 8 GB RAM?

Is there a hack around that? I can easily see future software filling that amount and more simply due to shear inefficiency.
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post #27 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:27pm
Quote:
Originally posted by billybobsky
So do the 64 bit processors address only up to 8 GB RAM?

Is there a hack around that? I can easily see future software filling that amount and more simply due to shear inefficiency.

64-bit processors can address up to 2^64 bytes of RAM. This equates to roughly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes (18.45 quintillion (pentillion?) whatever comes after quadrillion bytes I believe?).

Apple just designed their motherboards to max out at 8GB, I'm sure they could easily up that limit if necessary. IOW, the chip's RAM addressability limit won't be hit for some time.
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post #28 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:27pm
Yeah, I think iMovie 4 is just not meant to handle the ammount of cuts, transitions, effects, and titles I throw at it. No matter if I have 512, a GB, or even 8GB, that program is just whack. I had to step up to Fincal Cut Express and Im hoping 512 does the job there....the funny thing was, I bought FC and couldnt run it because it requries a minimum of 384 MB's of RAM.\

We'll see how it all plays out here tonight....I'll be sure to report my experience.
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post #29 of 54
2/4/04 at 2:38pm
Quote:
Originally posted by PBG4 Dude
64-bit processors can address up to 2^64 bytes of RAM. This equates to roughly 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes (18.45 quintillion (pentillion?) whatever comes after quadrillion bytes I believe?).

Apple just designed their motherboards to max out at 8GB, I'm sure they could easily up that limit if necessary. IOW, the chip's RAM addressability limit won't be hit for some time.

fine i accept that. however, why does it address 2^64 BYTES of ram and not BITS of ram?

or is each address 8 bit?
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post #30 of 54
2/4/04 at 7:02pm
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i'm waiting for the 1gb module to come out cheaper, 512 is really cheap, but since 256 is working just fine for me now i can wait

256 and working and waiting

i'd like to see what kind of reviews the new vpc 7 get and how it works with the ibook then i'll decide on ram
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post #31 of 54
2/4/04 at 7:07pm
Quote:
Originally posted by billybobsky
fine i accept that. however, why does it address 2^64 BYTES of ram and not BITS of ram?

or is each address 8 bit?

Each address is 64-bits. Otherwise there would be no way to cover all the addresses.

I found it weird that it's bytes not bit also, but 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 which is the 4GB limit of 32-bit processors. I just extrapolated from this to come up with the result I posted above.
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post #32 of 54
2/4/04 at 8:31pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Brad
k squared is right.

The OS will *always* keep 10-30 MB free no matter what is running. It holds this as an emergency slot for the kernel or other key system tasks.

...

Apparently that's what took down the mars rover Spirit. It filled up it's flash ram and a down it went.
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post #33 of 54
2/5/04 at 2:44pm
Quote:
Originally posted by Brad
k squared is right.

The OS will *always* keep 10-30 MB free no matter what is running. It holds this as an emergency slot for the kernel or other key system tasks.

Also, he's right that the OS will always use up as much as you have. Mac OS X caches things left and right to make your experience faster. It does, though, automatically free up cached data if another app needs memory. It's all done automatically and makes the system run much more faster.

This is why, for example, some apps will launch faster the second time they're opened. It's because part of the app is still retained in memory.

I checked last night and here was only 5Mb RAM free. Does this mean something isnt working properly?
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post #34 of 54
2/5/04 at 3:15pm
Sounds normal. 10-30 MB was really just a rough estimate I think.
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post #35 of 54
2/5/04 at 4:00pm
I dont think I installed the RAM correctly, in fact I know I didnt! It wont show up in the system profiler that anything is in the slot. I dont know what to do, I thought I had the module in the slot correctly snapped in (An Apple Module 256 MB). What do I need to do, I am confused...didnt think this was hard, I must be missing something.
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post #36 of 54
2/5/04 at 4:15pm
Ok, the drama is over. I opened up the iMac again, and the chip wasnt snapped in all the way I guess. I started back up checked the system profiler, and the screen went blue then went back to the normal desktop (Phew!). So then I checked the profiler again and it says I have 512 MB of RAM and the slot is now occupied, sooo Im all set! Whew, I didnt think I was that stupid.
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post #37 of 54
2/7/04 at 3:23am
actuly i dont understand how does apple sell the emac with 128 mb of ram if on the panthers guide it says it needs 256 + .

why does all the apple computers take so much ram on a "PC" 512 is more then enogth even though xp is 139 ram waste..
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post #38 of 54
2/7/04 at 4:31am
Quote:
Originally posted by hack4ev3r
actuly i dont understand how does apple sell the emac with 128 mb of ram if on the panthers guide it says it needs 256 + .

why does all the apple computers take so much ram on a "PC" 512 is more then enogth even though xp is 139 ram waste..

OS X can run on 128. It just won't run very fast. The reason OS X gobbles up vast amounts of memory if it can is that it's doing things XP isn't, like caching entire filesystems in memory, and holding onto programs you've quit in memory so that they launch faster the next time around. The point is the OS X will actively try to get as much mileage out of all of your memory as it possibly can.

And in my personal experience, XP on 256 is a bit of a nightmare, although this probably wasn't helped by the intel integrated graphics (or the manufacturer, Dell). XP on 512 is pretty reasonable but so is OS
X.
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post #39 of 54
2/7/04 at 4:57am
Quote:
Originally posted by staphbaby
OS X can run on 128. It just won't run very fast. The reason OS X gobbles up vast amounts of memory if it can is that it's doing things XP isn't, like caching entire filesystems in memory, and holding onto programs you've quit in memory so that they launch faster the next time around. The point is the OS X will actively try to get as much mileage out of all of your memory as it possibly can.

And in my personal experience, XP on 256 is a bit of a nightmare, although this probably wasn't helped by the intel integrated graphics (or the manufacturer, Dell). XP on 512 is pretty reasonable but so is OS
X.

the problem with your windows experiance was probably the proc, was it a celeron? if so it would be eqivelent to a g3 as a Penteum IV is equal to a G5 .i cant say this enough, celeron is a crummy chip, go for athalon it is much cheaper, ands as for dell, the new dell we got last year (the last week floppy drives were included) is amasingly fast i can play quake 3 on the intel graphics chip without a hiccup

256 on windows is good enough for average work (web, email, even c++ compiuleing) just dont open more than like 6 windows and you are good. my box (an old hp) has 384 and it handles LESS than the 256 on a dell

the ram is a verry small peice of the puzzle if I was to order a mac, i would go for the fastest proc, low ram, buy ram on crucial and get 8 gigs for like 200-300$
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post #40 of 54
2/7/04 at 4:58am
hmm true but programs that run on windows take x2 memory on mac.. take diablo for an example 128 megs on windows 512 on mac and the graphic card also needs high amount.. need for speed on windows 64 mb need for speed on mac 128! you get what im saying? os 9 is about 70% less ram the osx .
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