Macbook 4Gig RAM?

3296 Views 5 Replies 4 Participants Last post by fyrefly, Jul 21, 2007

fyrefly

Discussion Starter · Jul 21, 2007

I know the new fad is to put 4Gig RAM into the SR MBPs.

What about the C2D MacBooks (non-Pro), which officially support only 2GB, but people have had them running with 3GB.

I've read somewhere that the 3GB actually offers worse performance in some tasks compared to the 2GB, as you're not getting the Dual Channel throughput from Matched Pairs.

But... theoretically, if you put 2 x 2GB sticks in there -- you should get the RAM Performance boost, as well as avoiding the 3GB "non-matched-pairs" issue?

Anyone tried this?

I've seen 2GB Modules for as low as $119.99 -- so I'd be interested to try this, but I wanna hear what others have experienced?

I also realize, that as MacWorld listed in an article:

Macworld.com said:
The new 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz MacBook Pro models employ Intel’s “Santa Rosa” microprocessor and bus design, which enables them to properly register 4GB of RAM. Older Core 2 Duo-equipped MacBook Pros are limited to 3GB of RAM.

But again, there are "non-matched-pair" issues with the MBs and 3GB RAM. So would the 4GB actually help/improve performance more than 3GB, even if the system can only register 3GB RAM? Would the difference even be noticeable?

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fyrefly

Discussion Starter · #2 · Jul 21, 2007

Apparently I've answered my own question -- by just googling some more.

OWC has a huge comparative article on MBs and more RAM.

4GB seems to help the computer over 3GB in every instance, except for in XBench results. (though the difference isn't always huge, as far as I can tell).

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jaline

· #3 · Jul 21, 2007

Apparently the extra gig evens out with the fact that you don't have the same amount of RAM in each slot (meaning you wouldn't have it at the optimal performance level) thereby evening out and resulting in pretty much the speeds that you would get with 2 GB RAM.

I think I may try the 3GB in the future, but right now I'm sticking with 2GB.

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dibenga

· #4 · Jul 21, 2007

heres a question is there a possibility that machines that only address 3 of the 4 gigs will eventually be able to address the full 4 through an flash upgrade?

or is it a hardware limitation that can't be overcome?

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CanadaRAM

· #5 · Jul 21, 2007

dibenga said:
heres a question is there a possibility that machines that only address 3 of the 4 gigs will eventually be able to address the full 4 through an flash upgrade?

or is it a hardware limitation that can't be overcome?

Hardware limitation of the chipset.

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fyrefly

Discussion Starter · #6 · Jul 21, 2007

CanadaRAM said:
Hardware limitation of the chipset.

AKA a hardware limitation that can't be overcome with upgrades. Whenever Apple gets around to upgrading the MacBooks with Santa Rosa (or, *sigh*, if they wait long enough for the upgrade to be Penryn) then the MacBooks will be able to address all 4GB of RAM.

Until then, you're forced to put in 4GB only to get the dual-channel boost, which seems to be negligible at best.

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