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PacHead · Apr 3, 2007, 02:45 AM

I'm probably going to pick up a macbook this week sometime. I want the black one, I don't give a crap if it costs more, though I do think that Apple is being sneaky in their pricing, but whatever.

What I wanted to know is to find out if it's really worth it to go for 3 gigs of Ram. I'm definitely going for 2 gigs, but is there anything significant to be gained in getting 3 ? I'm not doing any heavy duty photoshop or anything like that, and I don't like to have 1 million apps open at the same time like some people do.

I've never used any intel macs before, so I don't know how Ram hungry they are, I'm only used to PPC macs. The 5400 drive is obviously a bottleneck in the macbook, but I'll most likely replace that soon. Will having 3 gigs of ram make everyday tasks snappier, like surfing the web etc ?

Unless I hear from somebody that has 3 gigs installed in their machine, and there is a significant speed improvement over 2 gigs, I'll just go for the 2 gigs, but I'm just making sure, before I order the chips.

skacoreimplore · Apr 3, 2007, 02:52 AM

the macbook wont recognize over 2gigs

PacHead · Apr 3, 2007, 03:08 AM

Originally Posted by skacoreimplore

the macbook wont recognize over 2gigs

That's what I first thought, but I even saw a screenshot with somebody having 3 gigs of ram in their macbook. There's even a store selling a 3 gig kit for the macbook (owc I think). I think you can even install 4 gigs into a macbook, but the machine will only see and use 3. I think the 3 gigs applies to the core II only.

Just because Apple says 2 gigs is the max doesn't make it so. I remember in the past that Apple's maximum ram specifications could be exceeded on certain powerbooks. When I bought my pismo a long time ago, I had more ram put in than what Apple said could be done, and it worked just fine.

wilsonng · Apr 3, 2007, 03:13 AM

Apple Mac Book Memory DDR2 667MHz and 2.5" SATA Hard Drive Upgrades at OtherWorldComputing.com

You can get up to 3 GBs of RAM on your MacBook if you have the Core 2 Duo model....

The original Core Duo MacBooks can only go up to 2 GBs of RAM.

Haven't tried it (yet) but looking forward to it when I get tax season out of the way.... :-(

PacHead · Apr 3, 2007, 03:29 AM

Originally Posted by wilsonng

Haven't tried it (yet) but looking forward to it when I get tax season out of the way.... :-(

E-File early. I already got my refund a month ago.

dr_atheist · Apr 3, 2007, 07:01 AM

Whether or not it's possible, if you have 3 gigs of RAM you will not have a matched pair. This is important for video performance on Macbooks, and it addresses both chips simultaneously and gets a 10-15% speed increase from a matched pair. With the intel GMA video chipset this is important. It will work without the matched pair, but you'll notice it get slower.

pcguy1 · Apr 3, 2007, 08:16 AM

The match pair performance hit is very much overrate from all report that I come across, so I don't think that is a issue at all.
however, if you don't use "heavy duty photoshop or a million app over at once), there is absolutely no reason that I can think of to up your memory from 2G to 3G, memory that your system never access is just waste money, give it to a charity or spend it on a bigger/faster hd would be a better use of $$$.
imo

mfbernstein · Apr 3, 2007, 08:27 AM

Aside from heavy use of Parallels and fancy graphics and video apps from Adobe and Apple, you're not going to see much advantage from 3GB. At any rate, buying the extra RAM from Apple is rather pricey. Why not order the memory after you've had the machine for a bit and have a better gauge on what you'll be doing with it? Checking on memory usage in Activity Monitor will give you a good indication of how much VM paging is an issue.

wilsonng · Apr 3, 2007, 09:58 AM

I remember reading a link on Macsurfer that having more RAM will be more advantageous than having matched pairs of RAM chips.

With Intel GMA taking up a hefty chunk (especially when hooking up an external monitor for dual monitor supprt), it would be nice to have spare RAM left over for your application's desires.

I always thought that you can never have enough RAM.

pcguy1 · Apr 3, 2007, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by wilsonng

I remember reading a link on Macsurfer that having more RAM will be more advantageous than having matched pairs of RAM chips.

With Intel GMA taking up a hefty chunk (especially when hooking up an external monitor for dual monitor supprt), it would be nice to have spare RAM left over for your application's desires.

I always thought that you can never have enough RAM.

I might be wrong on this, but I thought the max among of memory Intel GMA could use/access is "Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory", I actually wish it could access more.

Apple - MacBook - Technical Specifications

As for never have enough RAM, that is correct to the point until your memory is just sitting there and never to be access, remember we are talking about laptop and typical application and not a "server farm".

PacHead · Apr 3, 2007, 12:19 PM

Originally Posted by mfbernstein

Aside from heavy use of Parallels and fancy graphics and video apps from Adobe and Apple, you're not going to see much advantage from 3GB. At any rate, buying the extra RAM from Apple is rather pricey. Why not order the memory after you've had the machine for a bit and have a better gauge on what you'll be doing with it? Checking on memory usage in Activity Monitor will give you a good indication of how much VM paging is an issue.

Oh yeah, no doubt, I've used macs long enough to know that I don't buy my ram from Apple, lol. You probably couldn't even get a macbook with 3 gigs installed from Apple, since they don't support it. I'm probably just going to order 2 gigs from a seperate place and I'll see how the machine performs after I've used it for a bit. If I feel I need more, I can always get more in the future I guess.

PacHead · Apr 3, 2007, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by pcguy1

As for never have enough RAM, that is correct to the point until your memory is just sitting there and never to be access, remember we are talking about laptop and typical application and not a "server farm".

That's true, if an extra gig sits there and never gets accsessed, it's obviously a waste. Though I don't do any photoshop stuff, I might use it for audio stuff sometimes, but I guess 2 gigs should probably be ok for that.

mfbernstein · Apr 3, 2007, 12:57 PM

pcguy: Actually, the GMA950 uses _at least_ 80MB of RAM for graphics memory on the MacBook. I believe the GMA950 can use up to 224MB of RAM, although Apple may have limited it additionally. In principle, the amount allocated depends on how much RAM you have, and what video demands you're placing on the 950.

pcguy1 · Apr 3, 2007, 11:43 PM

Even if that is true, 224MB out of 2G is really not a big chuck, even with os and assort widget, you are still looking at 1 +G for application, plenty except when u deal with video and high resolution photo. imo

mfbernstein · Apr 4, 2007, 12:35 AM

No, agreed. I'm just saying that the exact amount is somewhat variable, lower bound of 80MB, upper bound of 224MB. YMMV.

frdmfghtr · Apr 11, 2007, 02:14 PM

I'd suggest saving the extra money and stick with 2 GB. I have 2 GB in my C2D MB which is plenty, plenty of RAM. The ratio of page ins/page outs from Activity monitor is better than 100:1, i.e. the page outs are less than 1% of the page ins, and that is with using Parallels occasionally and playing WoW, and that was after 20+ days of uptime (currently I'm sitting at 452452/827, or about 547:1). To me that means less swapping to the hard drive and subsequent power savings/performance boost. 3 GB won't help much, and would actually draw a touch more power from the battery when away from the wall outlets.

Besides, I would venture a guess that the extra 1 GB that won't be recognized still draws power, so you would be sacrificing battery life to a but of hardware that provides zero benefit.

mfbernstein · Apr 11, 2007, 02:24 PM

And why wouldn't the extra GB be recognized?

Eug · Apr 11, 2007, 03:17 PM

The MacBook can slow right down with GPU related stuff if you don't use matched RAM. You generally can't use tests from PCs or other Macs as an indicator for performance on the MacBook, because other machines usually don't have a GPU that is dependent on system RAM.

frdmfghtr · Apr 11, 2007, 03:19 PM

Sorry, I wasn't clear...I was thinking 2x2GB, or 4 GB installed using a matched pair of 2 GB sticks.

jokell82 · Apr 11, 2007, 03:35 PM

I've been thinking of upgrading to 3 gigs recently. I run at least one instance of parallels almost constantly, and a second instance sometimes as well. I'm responsible for about 50 computers, a mix of Macs and PCs, and I need to be able to run OS X, XP, and Vista. Being able to keep both XP and Vista full time would be awesome, but right now it slows my machine to a crawl.

So if you need it, get the 3 gigs. But from the original post in the thread it sounds like 3 gigs probably wont benefit you at all over 2 gigs...

Eug · Apr 11, 2007, 04:31 PM

Originally Posted by frdmfghtr

Sorry, I wasn't clear...I was thinking 2x2GB, or 4 GB installed using a matched pair of 2 GB sticks.

Ouch. $$$$$

PacHead · Apr 17, 2007, 11:49 AM

Hey, thanx 4 all the replies !

Here's an update to this thread. I just ordered my black macbook today. I actually went for the refurb model, so it only comes out to $1299 and I won't feel like Apple is ripping me off for the black paint job ! I've had refurb Macs in the past and they've worked out great for me, so I have no worries at all with getting a refurb.

I'm going to order 2 gigs of Ram when the Macbook arrives and I'm going to remove the 2x512 chips inside the Macbook and get a refund for them, since they're absolutley useless to me.

My (black) Pismo finally died on me after 6 years of faithful service, so this black Macbook had better be a nice replacement for it.

ixus_123 · 01:53 PM

Are these core 2 duos 32 bit or 64 bit? If they are 32 bit does the fact that they are dual core give you a 32 + 32 of sorts?

What I'm getting at is that a limitation of 32 bit systems is that we an only have a max of slightly over 3gb ram recognised by the system - say perhaps 3.15gb for example.

We get about 4 gb of usable memory address space but this is system wide so bios / firmware , graphics etc will all take their chunk of available address space, leaving (in the case of a server I worked on) not much over 3gb so in this case 4gb of ram might be wasted? If they are 32bit, does the fact that we have another core give us more memory address space to play with?

Can someone more in the know shed some light on this please? (maybe this might have been better in a new thread?)

PacHead · Apr 17, 2007, 04:39 PM

Wow, Apple is quick today. I just ordered the macbook 5-6 hours ago, and it's already shipped.

mduell · Apr 17, 2007, 08:10 PM

Originally Posted by ixus_123

Are these core 2 duos 32 bit or 64 bit? If they are 32 bit does the fact that they are dual core give you a 32 + 32 of sorts?

What I'm getting at is that a limitation of 32 bit systems is that we an only have a max of slightly over 3gb ram recognised by the system - say perhaps 3.15gb for example.

We get about 4 gb of usable memory address space but this is system wide so bios / firmware , graphics etc will all take their chunk of available address space, leaving (in the case of a server I worked on) not much over 3gb so in this case 4gb of ram might be wasted? If they are 32bit, does the fact that we have another core give us more memory address space to play with?

Can someone more in the know shed some light on this please? (maybe this might have been better in a new thread?)

Core 2 Duo is a 32 or 64-bit chip. But the chipset only supports 32 bits for addressing memory.
The chipset (945GM) physically supports 4GB RAM, but due to the PCI addressing overhead (and one other overhead I think) you can only use ~3.4GB of it. Apple decided to limit their machines to only support 3GB in the firmware, instead of letting people install 4GB and use 3.4GB (with dual channel performance) like some other brands do.

ixus_123 · Apr 18, 2007, 05:44 PM

Ah thanks

That clears up a bit

The firmware will take a hefty chunk of that address space too - 250mb at an estimate

PacHead · Apr 21, 2007, 11:10 AM

I received my new (refurb) macbook this morning. I'm typing on it right now. I've only used it for a little while, but so far everything seems sweet. I'm not 100% used to the keyboard and trackpad yet, but so far I'm liking the macbook overall. I'm going to order the 2 gigs of ram in a couple of days.