[bootle]

Hi Guys,

First-time poster, I wasn't sure if this should go in this forum or the power mac forum. This seems more reasonable!

I have a circa-2003 PowerMac (mirrored drive) with dual 1.25 GHz G4s and 1 Gig RAM, running Tiger.

It seems I can max out the RAM to 2Gb for around $100-120 (two 512mb sticks of PC2700). That's strikes me as a pretty reasonable price.

Do you guys think it is worth it? Any predictions on a performance gain? 1 Gig ain't shabby, so I wouldn't expect a gain as great as going from, say, 256 to 1 gb, but what do you guys think?

I do fairly intensive stuff with the machine: MATLAB and Python computations with the occasional Maple or Mathematica thrown in. Python won't see a speedup but Matlab is an enormous RAM hog! Do you think Tiger would get snappier, or is the bottleneck more the processor than the RAM at this point?

Anyone happen to know what type of brand is best for this mac (kingston, corsair?) and what about ECC and Cas Latency? Apple doesn't seem to give specs for that, at least that I can find...

Thanks a bunch,
Bootle

[mduell]

If you're swapping (needing to use virtual memory on the disk) and the added RAM eliminates that, you'll notice a huge performance increase. If you're not swapping, you may not notice it at all (unless you run more programs than you did before).
You don't need ECC. I'd buy Crucial.

[Lateralus]

Only not from Crucial, buy it from a reseller like NewEgg to save some change.

[leehotti]

Max it out. OSX loves ram.

[bowwowman]

MaXDaRam !
rAmRuLeS
Ram Bam, thankya maam

[bootle]

Cool!

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll definitely keep 'em in mind.

You're right Lateralus, newegg is the way to go. I've been a fan of them for a while!