upgraded RAM and no difference?
Community Forums/General Help/upgraded RAM and no difference?
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| I recently installed some used DDR3 modules from an older broken laptop into my iMac, but I can see no difference in performance after doing it. I had 8GB of RAM before the upgrade and have a total of 14GB afterwards. in Ubuntu/OSX, it shows having all four memory slots being filled with one 2GB module and three 4GB modules. I cannot tell any difference when gaming or video editing, etc than before. Is the RAM not talking to the computer? Why isn't the computer any faster? I dual boot with Ubuntu 12.10 (32bits) and OSX 10.8.2. Specs: AMD Radeon 6770M i7 2.8GHz DDR3 RAM is at 1333MHz have already installed the correct AMD proprietary drivers from the website. also, I installed rEFIt and cannot adjust the apple led backlit display using the f1 and f2 keys. (ubuntu) |
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| I don't know anything about Macs but 8GB is a fair whack of RAM to start with. I doubt you have seen any performance improvement simply because the newly installed RAM hasn't been needed yet. You could try setting up a ramdisk or something to try and improve things, I guess. |
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| You could try setting up a ramdisk or something to try and improve things, I guess. What is a ramdisk? is there a way to use some of the RAM as shared video memory? thnx! |
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| What is a ramdisk? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ramdisk ;) |
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| LOL! why did I click that? :D |
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| Adding more RAM only makes a performance difference if you're starting off with a stupidly small amount. |
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| for all we know you were not using more than 4gb as it was, it's nice to have more when working on large photo (multiple undo etc)/video files, but having more does not mean the pc (generic term) will be using more. I am eyeing up a prebuilt system (not self built in so long I don't know what is what regards to low mid high end GFX cards etc, all I know is i7 is better than i5 and i3, AMD no sodding idea) for future video editing, I should be able to go moderatly high spec (without knowing what exactly IS high spec save it's an i7 with 16gb) in a month or so, but I might find it over powered and under used when I actually come to use it for video editing, if I do do that in the end (need to buy a camcorder and have a reason to film) 16gb sounds like alot but if the video file fails to dent it I could have saved money (probably not much in the long run) |
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| You have the 32-bit version of Ubuntu installed. It can't access that much memory, so it will not see a speed boost from superfluous RAM. |
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| Also, you mentioned putting that into your iMac. What is the max the motherboard on that allows? Apple usually have ridiculous limitations for max RAM when you consider they have 64-bit OSes. |
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| Is the RAM not talking to the computer? Why isn't the computer any faster? Unless you are running applications that need a lot of memory, you'll probably not going to feel much difference between 8GB and 14GB at all. It's diminishing returns: 256MB -> 512MB = huge difference. 512MB -> 1GB = big difference 1GB -> 2GB = some difference 2GB -> 4GB = some difference 4GB -> 8GB = little difference 8GB -> more = meh. |
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| What is the max the motherboard on that allows? 16GB not going to feel much difference between 8GB and 14GB at all. the only "real" difference I can tell is that I can allocate more ram to virtual machines without slowing down my machine. |
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| the only "real" difference I can tell is that I can allocate more ram to virtual machines without slowing down my machine. Were you expecting anything different? |
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| Usualy you'll see speed improvemtns when your previous amount of RAM was causing the OS to paginate memory on disk. Otherwise, it'll be exactly the same |
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| Check the activity monitor, there is a tab at the bottom that gives you a nice pie char of memory allocations, along with hard numbers. Anything green hasn't been touched in any way. Load up your typical work space (IDE's graphics tools, virtual machines, etc. whatever you want to have running simultaneously) and check your allocation. If you still see green you have more ram than you will use in any normal load. That's a good thing, but a lot of green means you have more ram than you really need, again, a good thing but it won't help you in any way unless you use it. Running more apps will use more ram, but also more processor time. You're likely to hit performance bottlenecks with the processor before RAM unless you have a very specific usage scenario (such as multiple large virtual machines, but you're only actively using one at a time). No, you can't choose the memory allocation for the graphics card. Don't know what generation of iMac you have, some older ones used shared memory, but the allocation is still fixed in hardware. Newer models have discrete graphics cards with dedicated VRAM. Honestly for any normal person 8gb is more than enough for anything they would do including heavy duty gaming. Developers aren't normal, and there are plenty of other specialists who can really take advantage of extra ram (graphic artists as the stock example with a MASSIVE photoshop cache space). If you really never touch the ram above 8gb you may actually have better system performance without the extra ram because the system can make certain optimizations to memory handling when you have cleanly distributed banks. It won't make a noticeable difference, but it might make a calculable difference to memory access rate. But if you ever touch that extra ram, not having to page in and page out from the HDD will *WAY* more than make up for memory bank optimizations. In a perfect world you would have maximum ram with perfectly even distribution so there's no bottlenecks and you never need to think about it... 24gb in my mac pro, I hardly ever go above 8 but when I do it's SOOOOOOO worth it, and I never have to give it a second thought, the convenience of always getting (near) peak performance is worth it for me... plus a mac pro is the stupidest computer in the world to buy if you don't push it. |
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