Best memory configuration for a Power Mac G5?

September 22, 2005 9:38 PM

Which is a better memory configuration on a Power Mac G5: 4x1GB or 8x512? What's the advantage/disadvantage of either configuration (besides the price)?

What's difference does multiples of 512s versus GBs make? Main purpose of the Power Mac would be for Photoshop and Final Cut. Can't wait for the Intel-ization either.

posted by squink to computers & internet (4 comments total)

It doesn't make any significant difference at all, unless you want to add more memory to the machine later, without getting rid of some of the memory you've got now.

Go with whatever's cheaper.
posted by xil at 9:48 PM on September 22, 2005

neither truly matter. I'd say 4x1gig. Prices between 2 512s vs. 1 1gig stick aren't significant.

By buying 4x1 gig, you leave 4 slots open. Buy 8 512s and you'll have to remove ram to add it later.
posted by filmgeek at 9:50 PM on September 22, 2005

Agree with filmgeek.

You may be able to get by on less memory however. I have 2GB on my G5 (4 x 1GB - dual 2ghz processor), and even with a huge Photoshop file open and loads of other stuff going on, Activity Monitor still shows some free memory.

Curious to hear opinions whether I might see better performance if I upped the memory on my machine.
posted by omnidrew at 7:41 AM on September 23, 2005

omnidrew: only if it prevents you from swapping. Photoshop does explicit paging anyway, so if your memory utilisation doesn't get very high, you might want to go into its config and tell it how much physical ram to use. If you increase that (not so much that the OS swaps), you can reduce the amount of explicit paging that photoshop does and therefore it will be faster.

Also, the system should show you have 4GB available, not 2. The fact that there are 2 processors is irrelevant, each should be able to see the whole address space, though (I think!) access to half of it will be slower - I think G5s are a NUMA-style thing rather than everything hanging off a common bus like the older intel SMP systems.

squink: what filmgeek said.
posted by polyglot at 8:40 AM on September 23, 2005