On 22 Feb 2005, at 09:50, Bruce Johnson wrote:
And, how much worse would 512MB be than 768MB ?
Also depends on what you're doing.
RAM affects mostly how fast your system responds when you're either doing RAM-instensive operations, or running many things at once.
I know this sounds stupidly basic, but that's because it is pretty stupidly basic.
128->256 MB is a huge leap in performance, because the OS is choked down there.
256->512 MB is less noticeable, because you then have the much less swapping, but if you're doing many things at once it'll be noticeable. (note this doesn't mean running many programs at once, but having them do things all at once.)
512 and up is really only noticeable if you're cranking through large RAM hungry ops, like Photoshop, 3D rendering/modelling, audio, video (though, surprisingly, video is less RAM limited than CPU limited. A single frame of video is actually rather small, compared to say a rendering tree for a 1024x768 image or a 5 MP RAW camera image) or some more exotic stuff like bioinformatics or really really REALLY big spreadsheets.
I suspect you will be hard pressed to notice the difference between 768 MB and 1G in most daily stuff.
I just upgraded my 933MHz iBook G4 from 640MB to 1152MB, and noticed a pretty significant difference. With nothing else running, OS X and the Finder will often use up to 500MB, and iPhoto will happily use 250MB during prolonged scrolling. Currently, with Finder, Mail, Adium X, Installer, Terminal, Address Book, iCal, TextEdit, Preview, Taco HTML Edit and Safari open, 1.11GB of my RAM is in use.
Personally, with a 15" AlBook, I'd go straight to 1.5 or 2GB. RAM isn't that expensive these days, a 1GB PC2700 SODIMM shouldn't cost any more than US$250.
Cheers, Ben
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