MacBook Pro RAM

jbfresh1 · July 2, 2006 4:13AM

I am looking to buy a 15" MBP with 1 GB RAM, but I am unsure of whether to go with the 2 512MB cards and fill both slots or just fill one slot with a single 1 GB card. Would it be much more beneficial to leave the other slot open to possibly add RAM in the future. I may do some minor video editing and some presentations for school, so I'm not sure which I should really go with. Thanks for any help.

imacfan · July 2, 2006 4:20AM

With the seperate graphics card of the MBP, dual channel RAM doesn't matter too much at all - a couple of percent at the very most for some tasks. You'll be better off getting just one stick. The opposite advice goes for the MacBook.

David

lundy · July 2, 2006 8:29AM

Concur!

Quote:

Originally posted by iMacfan

With the seperate graphics card of the MBP, dual channel RAM doesn't matter too much at all - a couple of percent at the very most for some tasks. You'll be better off getting just one stick. The opposite advice goes for the MacBook.

David

jbfresh1 · July 2, 2006 3:38PM

so basically one stick is better because the difference isn't very noticable and the option to add another stick is always available as well?

imacfan · July 2, 2006 4:22PM

Quote:

Originally posted by jbfresh1

so basically one stick is better because the difference isn't very noticable and the option to add another stick is always available as well?

Bingo!

jbfresh1 · July 2, 2006 5:27PM

ok... thanks all

tekmate · July 2, 2006 7:19PM

I have never tested this on the new Macs but on PCs at work there is a good 20% improvement when using two sticks. End users can see the difference when we use the non dual channel machines.

tipton · July 7, 2006 12:44AM

Also, you should order it with 512MB of RAM, then go to www.ramseeker.com where you can get 2GB of RAM for less than the cost of upgrading to 1GB through Apple.

axc51 · July 7, 2006 11:35AM

Out of curiousity... has anyone ordered the RAM from powerline memory or 18004memory? If so, what are you experiences with their product? Thanks!

mbaynham · July 9, 2006 12:18PM

i think you would be better off getting 2 512mb sticks, but its up to you

technarch · July 9, 2006 1:28PM

The ram in the MacBook doesn't work in dual channel mode. I have an email from Intel to confirm this. So you will do fine with a single stick if you want. It's in the chip errata, that they shut it off at higher bus speeds due to errors or something.

I have 1 gig with 2 512mb sticks, and I am finding now that I wish I had 2 gigs instead because apparently, if one opens up a web browser, and opens a lot of tabs with a lot of large images on them, it eats up a lot of ram, like over 400 megs of real memory. I don't recall this happening on Windows.

Mushkin seems to be having a sale on the ram sticks I noticed last night, so you could look there.

1337_5l4xx0r · July 10, 2006 8:49AM

I've had a very bad experience with 1 800 4 memory. I've had many, many good experiences with eshop.macsales.com

Forewarned is forearmed!

axc51 · July 10, 2006 8:51AM

Quote:

Originally posted by 1337_5L4Xx0R

I've had a very bad experience with 1 800 4 memory. I've had many, many good experiences with eshop.macsales.com

Forewarned is forearmed!

Thanks for your warning. I actually ended up purchasing the 2gb RAM for my gf's MB through Macsales... hopefully it ships today!

londor · July 11, 2006 2:18PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Technarch

The ram in the MacBook doesn't work in dual channel mode. I have an email from Intel to confirm this. So you will do fine with a single stick if you want. It's in the chip errata, that they shut it off at higher bus speeds due to errors or something.

I find it hard to believe when Apple clearly states that it has dual channel memory architecture.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303553

axc51 · July 11, 2006 2:25PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Londor

I find it hard to believe when Apple clearly states that it has dual channel memory architecture.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303553

That's for the Macbook Pro, which is in fact dual-channel for sure. But since the graphics share the memory on the Macbook models it may not work in dual-channel mode.

londor · July 11, 2006 2:35PM

Quote:

Originally posted by axc51

That's for the Macbook Pro, which is in fact dual-channel for sure. But since the graphics share the memory on the Macbook models it may not work in dual-channel mode.

I know it is for the MacBook Pro but according to him the reason for not having dual channel is that "it is in the chip errata, that they shut it off at higher bus speeds due to errors or something."

Sine MacBook and MacBook Pro have the same CPU and the same bus speed if it does not work for the MacBook it should not work for the MacBook Pro.

technarch · July 11, 2006 2:52PM

In my email it says:

"The Intel(R) Dual-Frequency Graphics Technology feature was disabled in the 945GM drivers as a workaround for a chipset hardware issue. This is documented in 945GM chipset hardware specification update: http://www.intel.com/design/mobile/specupdt/309220.htm . Please see the errata 11 of this document."

The thing I'm wondering about here is, they're talking about graphics, but if they shut off dual channel for the gma950 graphics wouldn't this also follow that dual channel in general is always turned off? I suppose the only real way to find out for sure would be to have someone benchmark with 1 gig of 2 512mbs, and a single 1 gig stick. Not using graphics, just memory bandwidth operations and see what happens. On the regular MacBook however using assymetric sticks was shown to make very little difference. Not sure how the MBP would react.

londor · July 11, 2006 3:02PM

As I understand it the graphics card does not have dual channel memory so it can not access both sticks at the same time but that does not mean that the computer can not access one stick while the graphics card is accessing the other. So the computer has dual channel memory but the graphics card does not. Please correct me if I am wrong.

MacBook Pro RAM

Comments