I’m looking to upgrade the RAM on my Mac Mini.
4GB sticks are £30 at Crucial and a 8GB set is £60 (oddly enough ;))
However, my question is, would I suffer any problems buying a 4GB stick and changing out on the 1GB sticks I already have (current is 2 x 1GB sticks)?
That would give me a total of 5GB as I’m sure I really need 8GB…
4GB on my Macbook Pro seems plenty.
I don’t know about Macs, but I’ve always installed RAM on PCs in matched pairs. Never had any issues so far.
You can alot of the time run mixed pairs fine so long as they are the same volts and timings etc without any problems. Sometimes you can run matched pairs as one will slow down to match the slower stick.
Only thing you can do is try it out. Although i would check the maximum the motherboard allows. 8GB seems a pretty big step from 2GB, that would be my only concern.
8GB is the max my mobo can take - Apple verify this as does the Crucial memory check tool.
Memory according to Crucial is the same as what I already have.
Unless you have a 64 bit OS you’re not going to be able to use 8GB ???
Mac OS X is a hybrid 32/64 bit system.
You should be OK on 5GB but performance will not be as good as 8GB because the memory controller does not run in full dual channel mode but rather a hybrid mode offering performance somewhere between single and dual channel.
You may have noticed a number of laptops used to ship with 3GB and a 32-bit OS so they didn’t have to face the “Why does my PC say I only have 3/3.25/3.5GB of RAM when I have 4GB installed?” question. I have used those type of machines with a 64-bit OS and the difference in basic performance was not perceptible to me between 3GB and 4GB where true dual channel comes back into play.
Whether this would be exacerbated by 4+1 as opposed to 2+1 I couldn’t say, but unless you are doing work that requires maximum memory bandwidth then you’d probably be OK I would have thought.
I went for the 8GB in the end. Was the easiest way of making sure it all worked and means I wont have to upgrade in the future as I’ll have maxed the mobo. Any extra I can use as a RAM disk.
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