3 GB is the MacBook Pro Sweet Spot
Technology April 27th, 2007Since the price on a 2 GB MacBook Pro-compatible SO-DIMM recently entered the atmosphere on NewEgg.com, I went for it. I’m very, very pleased. My MacBook Pro generally performed well with 2 GB, but when I launched Parallels, I’d have to trim down my working set to make sure my system didn’t crawl.
After the upgrade, I can leave my full OS X working set up while Parallels does its thing and it all works fine (allocating 700 MB to a WinXP VM). Once thrashing starts during an OS X / Parallels session, man, game over.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Happened to me last night… IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, Photoshop CS3 and Paralells don’t play nice together
)
April 27th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I just upgraded to 3gb as well 2 weeks ago. I concur with you that it makes all the difference. I now leave Parallels running all the time in the background, as opposed to starting and stopping it as needed.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
I have been tempted for a while as 2Gb is just not enough. I am curious if we can go to 4Gb once Leopard is out. The laptop will take 4Gb but only address about 3.3Gb as 700Mb is needed for mapping hardware and Tiger is only using 32bit addressing. Leopard should bring 64bit addressing so should then have full 4Gb? Hope its true
April 28th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Jasper: Interesting, I read http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304662 and came away thinking that none of that last 4 GB would be addressed by the MBP; if 30% of it can be, that’s tempting, too.
I was under the impression that the bottleneck is not in the OS as Mac Pro’s can already address ungodly amounts of memory–after all, Tiger is 64 bit with a large number of 32 bit subsystems. Interesting to see…
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:07 am
Thanks for the pointer, ordered one myself and installed it today.
May 2nd, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Thanks for the heads up, I had given up on 2GB DIMMs and was resigned to thrashing with Parallels.
Have you seen any performance decrease? Using unmatched DIMMs means it can’t interleave, which drops the performance (a bit).
Of course, nothing’s slower than thrashing
Regarding 4GB, the macbook is only capable of addressing 3GB of RAM. This is a hardware limitation, not a software one. According to this article, it will address a small amount of the 4th GB, but most of it overlaps with other parts of the memory map and gets ignored. This apparantly is an Intel issue, not an Apple issue:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/MacBook-Pro-Core-2-Duo-Limitations-39006.shtml
I wonder if the performance increase of interleaving justifies adding a second 2GB DIMM just to get the interleaving? Barefeats thinks not:
http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html
May 11th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I’m wondering if this module works in the older MBP’s with the Core Duo chips. Looking at the specs for this module, it seems like it’s only for the Core 2 Duo chips.
May 17th, 2007 at 8:41 am
I got a 2Gb stick to upgrade to 3Gb for my MBP for $169 from Frys
May 6th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
U can get 4GB of kingston for 80 bucks on new egg.com