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techtrucker · Sep 16, 2003, 01:34 PM

Due to hard times I sold my iMac 800 and am back to using a B&W G3 400 (Rev 2). I put in a 30 GB 7200 rpm hard drive in it. It runs 10.2 pretty well with the current 256 MB memory. I am thinking about adding another 256 MB, but wondered if there would be any benefit to going any higher than that. I mainly run Project Builder, BBEdit, Terminal, Safari and Mail with occasional forays into PS Elements, Graphic Converter, and iPhoto. Oh, and iTunes of course.
My thinking is that I'll see a noticeable difference going 256->512 but beyond that it wouldn't make that much of a difference.
I know the general consensus is to throw as much memory into the machine as possible, but finances being what they are...

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Scotttheking · Sep 16, 2003, 02:27 PM

OSX is the most memory inefficient operating system I've used. You will definitely see a performance boost going to 512MB of ram. For light use there's no reason to go beyond that, however.

--Scott

techtrucker · Sep 16, 2003, 03:08 PM

Thanks, I figured 512MB would be the "sweet spot" for my purposes.

Uisce · Sep 16, 2003, 03:48 PM

Originally posted by techtrucker:
Thanks, I figured 512MB would be the "sweet spot" for my purposes.

Yeah, at 256, doubling that will def help.

techtrucker · Sep 16, 2003, 07:12 PM

The order's been placed, should be here Thursday, will post the results. Thanks.

superlarry · Sep 17, 2003, 04:06 PM

hopefully this won't be a problem, but the B&W's need low-density RAM (they don't support the newer, high-density stuff). you'll know if you received a high-density chip if your mac only sees and uses half of the RAM on it (i.e. it'll report it to be a 128MB chip, assuming you've ordered one 256MB chip).

techtrucker · Sep 18, 2003, 02:47 PM

Originally posted by superlarry:
hopefully this won't be a problem, but the B&W's need low-density RAM (they don't support the newer, high-density stuff). you'll know if you received a high-density chip if your mac only sees and uses half of the RAM on it (i.e. it'll report it to be a 128MB chip, assuming you've ordered one 256MB chip).

Thanks for the heads up, will find out tomorrow.

Chinasaur · Sep 21, 2003, 02:45 PM

FWIW, I had noticed a good jump in speed going from 512 to 768 on my B&W. I just popped in another 256MB to 1GB and noticed another speed jump, smaller, but noticeable.

As they say..OS X is a RAM pig..give it all you can afford.