How much is too much RAM?

[David Roth weiss]

Bob,

Presently it doesn’t make a lot of sense to load a MAC with lots of RAM as FCP can only utilize 3.5gb RAM total. That will change when the 64 OS comes out and when the new 64 bit version of FCP comes out.

DRW

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bob Flood] “if you went from 4gB to 16gB, would you see 4 times the real time performance? or would going from 4GB to 16GB only give you 2 times improvement?”

Not a whole lot of improvement because from what I understand, FCP still only accesses 2GB RAM maximum so 4GB is good. Where you will see improvement is in applications like After Effects where it can load more information into the RAM in less time.

But I would not purchase any more than 4GB RAM until Leopard and the next rev of FCP are released.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Bret Williams]

I thought this was interesting so I looked it up. In a 32bit addressable operating system any app can access up to 4GB. Including FCP. The maximum allocatable doesn’t include the 1.5 gigs of libraries that FCP can access. So FCP can utilize 4GB total. If you want the most from FCP then you’d want another couple gigs for the operating system and of course other running apps… mail, ps, ae, safari, etc. Plus, you don’t want to max the ram anyway, just like it’s preferable not to max the hard drive. Leave a little overhead.

[Bob Flood]

thanx to you All!

our “IT GUY” said that the OS could access as much ram as you put in, but i know this forum to be pretty darn close to the definitive word on this stuff

It sounds like 8 gB might be good to have, but anything over 8 gb would be a waste of money, at least until FCP is 64 bit

thanx again