Jump to content
13 posts in this topic

Recommended Posts

I just received a replacement for a faulty 512mb PC3200 dimm I ordered from newegg, bringing my Intel OS X system up to 1gb. My Xbench score shot up from 45 to 70!! (without user interface test selected). Has anyone else noticed such a huge increase because of ram? I also notice my webbrowsing and general GUI stuff is a LOT faster now. I knew OS X was ram intensive, but I didn't realize it would make such a noticeable difference.

 

System:

OS X 10.4.5

MSI 915GLM-V motherboard(fully compatible)

Celeron D 331

WD800 80gb SATA drive

2x 512mb PC3200 @ DDR333 =(

 

So if OS X is running slow and you have 512mb of ram..maybe spend the $35 on another stick, it's worth it =).

Link to comment
https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/12343-just-how-ram-intensive-is-os-x/
Share on other sites

I am at 1 gig right now, would be very curious to take this test even further, has anyone gone beyond a gig and achieved any signifcant performance gain?

 

I have another 1gb waiting on my desk at work (if the ebay elves have delivered) so will let you know if my 73+ score increases with 2gb in the machine.

Yes, I'd definitely be curious what my system would do with 2GB. I just built this system two weeks ago but I'd probably dump the ram and upgrade to 2GB if the performance gain would be anywhere as high as it was from 512MB to 1GB. As I said it isn't just Xbench either, everything in general seems tons faster. Flash animations don't lag my web browser at all, bringing up the dashboard is smooth no matter what I'm doing, even window minimize/maximize animations are smoother. Definitely surprising.

Rosetta works best with 1GB minimum: http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?s=...indpost&p=33880

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050810-5195.html

What does all of this mean for Mac users? First off, it means that anyone who plans to use Rosetta heavily will need plenty of memory. A while back, Transitive CEO Bob Wiederhold told the SJ Mercury News that translated apps will eat up about 25% more memory than their non-translated counterparts. I suspect that this number is an average, and not the result of a fixed code cache size that's allocated on a per-application basis. (Not that there's not a ceiling on the size of the translated code cache—there probably is—but I suspect that the code cache is kept as small as possible.) So make plans to order that new Intel-based Mac with a minimum of 1GB of main memory, and preferably 2GB or more.

System:

 

Pentium D 805 2.66 gHz 533 mHz FSB 2x1mb cache

Asus P5LD2-VM LGA775 i945

80 gb WD S-ATA HDD

OSx86 10.4.5

 

OLD: With 512mb standard DDR2 PC-4300 - xbench 58.15

NEW: Wiith 1gb (2x512mb) GEIL Dual Channel DDR2 PC2-4300 - xbench 72.56

With a Celeron D 2.8 Ghz and 1.5GB of RAM and 160GB HD on OS X 10.4.5. I got benchmarks in the 95+ zone.

Would love to know the full specs on the hardware you are running RA_WILL.

 

Well I went and added another set of paired DDR2 (PC4200) 512 chips to my system. This bring me a total of 2 Gb of DDR2 RAM all running at PC4200. Got an average xbench increase of about 2 points bringing be up to a whopping 76. Now I have a brand new LGA775 P4 w/ HT 3 Ghz CPU running on an Intel 945 board with serial ATA drives. What gives?! How in the bloody Homer Simpson is this guy getting 95+ on a Celeron?!

 

By the way, even though Xbench shows no diff,web pages load much more smoothly and PPC apps do run snappier.

Just went from 512MB to 1,25GB of RAM. In XBench there is no big difference (something about 2-5 points, can't remember), but some Applications startup faster (Terminal for example bounces just 1 time and is up and running, with 512MB it was 3-4times bouncing before I could do anything), switching between Applications is faster, and yes, minimizing/maximizing windows is as well smother.

 

CDFS

Try running Xbench with disabled user-interface test. Also, dont just blindly add ram to your system until the slots are full. The chipsets are dual-channel nowadays and just having 1.25gb of ram isn't going to be much faster (if at all) than it was with 1gb if it's disabling dual-channel.

×
×
  • Create New...