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2GB Ram enough for a newbie on a budget?
Hello everybody,
New guy here, although I have been lurking in the shadows for a while and finding lots of valuable advice from the members of this forum already…
I’ve been working with After Effects on a amateur level for some time now. I would say that I’m just above ‘beginners level’ and not much more…
I’m currently doing my first HD project and have realized that my 3,5 years old Powerbook G4 doesn’t cut it anymore. I have decided to take the leap and finally upgrade my work station and let the G4 be my surf machine. I’m on a tight budget and I think I have decided to for the following configuration of the Mac Pro:
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
2GB (2x1GB)
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MBNow my question is the following: While I understand that most of you will recommend an upgrade of the memory, I think my budget will not allow it right now. I will eventually do the upgrade for sure, but I wonder if someone can tell me how big a difference it would make?
Would an upgrade from 2GB to 4GB seriously shorten my render times in AE? I have searched for Benchmark tests, but they all compare memory configurations that are much higher.
I would really appreciate some insight in this issue, before I make the final decision which MAC to get. I’m buying it tomorrow in any case, but if I can only expect a 10-15% increase in render speed from a 2 GB upgrade, I think I would wait another month before upgrading.
Please let me know what you think!
/Alex
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3 Replies
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You can skimp on the memory from Apple and purchase it elsewhere at a better price. That goes for HDDs as well.
TC -
Thanks TC!
Yes, I’ve realized that I can get cheaper memory and install it myself and eventually I will definitely do that.
The problem is that I have a deadline and needed to buy the computer today… I just hoped that someone would tell me that 2GB would be enough, since I couldn’t wait and get the cheap memory.
Anyway, I decided to go for a 2GB update, since every post I could find seemed to recommend that asa minimum; so now I have 4GB to start with. I didn’t buy the memory from Apple at least, but it was still expensive compared to other sources, since I couldn’t wait… Well, the machine works great and it’s sooo much faster than my old PB G4…
Now, Im experiencing some trouble with new AE filters, but that’s another thread…
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you can always upgrade the ram as you go, that’s not a problem. also, as tc points out, there are other places to get good ram for much less than apple charges (otherworldcomputing.com often has good deals, they test their products on macs and i’ve never had a problem there).
with 2gb of ram, you may want to keep multiprocessing off in ae, but you can experiment with that.
if you want to monitor your system’s performance use the activity monitor (applications>utilities) and you’ll see how much your cpus are working. if your noticing that your cpus are often not getting close to 100%, then you’ll know that they are not getting enough data quickly enough to process at their full potential… that’s where more ram should help out. the more data you can have waiting to get processed then more efficiently the processors will be able to work.
another data bottleneck that i’ve started to see is with the drives, so as you increase your ram, you may also want to save up for an external sata2 card and fast sata2 drive array to help process all that hd footage a bit quicker.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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