Aluminum Macbook- Upgrading RAM

Hello everyone,

First, I apologies if this has been covered many times.

I just have a brief question regarding upgrading RAM on my Macbook. I have an Aluminum Macbook which I purchased at the beginning of the year. It has a 2.4 GHz processor, 2 GB DDR3 memory, 250GB HDD, and the 9400M graphics.

My question is:

1) Does upgrading from 2 to 4 make any significant difference in terms of photoshop and basic gaming? Would these differences also apply to regular use?

2) The memory speed is DDR3 1066 MHz. Does upgrading to a faster memory, for example, DDR3 1333 MHz make any difference? Or is the speed limited to 1066MHz, no matter how much faster the upgraded memory is?

Thanks ahead for any advice!

 

1. I see big differences between 2 and 4 when I am doing things.... but a lot of people claim it makes little difference. As cheap as RAM is, I dont see any reason to not put in 4gb.
2. The speed the memory is going to run is dictated by the bus. The speed rating on the RAM is not exactly a rating of how fast the memory will go, but how fast it can go. So no, putting higher speed memory in the machine will not make it run any faster, it will still run slower (if it works right). Its best to get memory that has the specific specs required, or to buy from somewhere like Crucial.com that will sell you memory guaranteed to work in your make/model machine.

 

1) i got a huge speed boost while going from 2gb to 4gb and would never go back to gb if i decided to buy another laptop. Virtual os runs flawlessly on 4gb.

2) I would suggest you buy a pc8500 ram (ddr3 1066Mhz) to get peace of mind. Dont bother about speed, a 1300mhz ram wont be significantly faster. The 1066 one is plenty fast (At least for me.). Good luck for the purchase.

@Doh123, nice to see you are participating in the os x forums. Keep it up and i hope you become a well known poster here . (Like me )

 

If you like to run a lot of programs at once the more RAM the better.

 

Agree with all the above: as cheap as RAM is these days, the more the better, and machines with 4GB just seem a lot "snappier" to me, even under light loads.