more RAM in MacBook Pro

[Jeff Carpenter]

Ok, since I was the one who said matching was a FCP thing, not a Mac thing. Here’s a couple of things:

1) When talking about the Mac Pro (as we were) it’s important to remember that you absolutely HAVE to have matched pairs of RAM. What I said was that you could have 2 pairs that didn’t match if you’re not a Final Cut Pro user. (So we’re talking about 4 chips.) So having two 512 chips and then adding two 1 GB chips would be ok (as far as the Mac is concerned…Final Cut would prefer that they all be the same). So even though the pairs don’t have to be paired, yes you totally have to have an even number of chips where each pair has matching chips.

2) That’s only true for the Mac Pro.

3) HOWEVER, the Macbook (regular non-Pro) and Mac Mini really like matched RAM too. This is because they don’t have video cards. Their system RAM gets shared as video RAM. The system will work with an un-matched pair (or one chip) but you’ll get better video performance with a matched pair. That only applies to those 2 computers, however. All the rest have dedicated video cards with their own video RAM.

4) The iMac and the Macbook Pro’s motherboard can only read 3 GB of RAM. You can put 4 GB in them (2 x 2GB) but the machine will only read 3 GB. You’d be wasting your money to buy 4 GB.

5) By getting an un-matched pair in the examples in #4…are you sacrificing performance? I really don’t know. I’d think so, but Apple sells them that way so it can’t be terrible. My best guess is that having 3 GB is worse than having (the impossible) 4 GB, but it’s still better than having 2 GB. So I’d say go for it.

[Colin Mcquillan]

which generation of MBP do you have?? if it’s the first run 2.16ghz 17″MBP I believe you are stuck with a max of 2 gigs. The 2nd run 2.33ghz is capable of 3gigs.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

[Todd Reid]

I have a first run, so I guess I’m stuck.

I thought this might be the case, as I’m not sure why I would only get 2GB of Ram if I had ther option for more.

thanks