OSX 10.4.11 RAM

[Unknown_K]

Was wondering where the sweet spot is for RAM using OSX 10.4.11

Every OS seems to have a spot where low RAM limits overall speed, was wondering what amount 10.4 need to run at optimum.

 

[jholt5638]

I'm running 640MB on my iBook G3 no slowdowns or lag but but I'm running any high demand apps

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Gig or better from what I've heard over the years. I have 384MB on my Cube running Tiger and it can be painful.

 

[markyb86]

I've got 512mb in my Sawtooth G4 (350mhz) and I run photoshop cs2 fine in it. It can lag when messing around with fonts in the text tool, but so does my i5 quad 3.5ghz desktop with 8gb of ram.

 

[rsolberg]

I haven't encountered any perceptible slowdowns with large amounts of ram. I've run it on G3, G4, and G5 machines with between 256MB and 10GB ram. I even got it to boot (but do nothing useful) on 128MB. The more, the better as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Unknown_K]

So 2GB is plenty just for the OS? Was wondering if I needed to dump a lot of ram into a DC 2.9 G5 or not, maybe 4-6GB is enough.

 

[lopaka1998]

 I think the sweet spot is around 512 - 768mb ram - depending upon what you're doing. I've never had a problem with 768mb ram on 10.4.11 - and that's running many "heavy" programs at once like photoshop cs3 and TenFourFox with many tabs open.

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Extra RAM never hurts. With as cheap as DDR2 is, it really depends on what you're doing I wouldn't expect you to need more than 4GB with Tiger on a G5.

 

[feeef]

I would say that the amount of RAM really depends on the apps you use. Tiger was not very heavy and the OS by itself works well with 256MB. It starts to be slow when you open apps that require a lot of RAM.

Personally, I have worked with a Powerbook G4 having 1GB of RAM for many years and never noticed any slowdown. Especially on tiger. I have done a lot of intense video editing and rendering on that machine and only replaced it in 2009 when it was time for me to move to HD videos.

 

[techknight]

apples to oranges here, but more RAM in a machine can sometimes cause it to run slower... Why I dunno. 

I had a Core 2 board with 2GB of RAM. I bumped it to 4, and it took 3 times as long at the windows logo to startup, and it felt sluggish in windows. Removed the extra 2GB and it was fine again. Odd. 

My main i7 desktop is the same way, I bumped it to 12GB from 4GB, and its made an impact in the overall speed to the negative. 

Thought about RAM timing and speed, but its equal as to what I had in it. So i can rule that out. Maybe the memory management with larger capacities takes way more CPU time to crunch that much space. I really dont know. 

But I digress....

 

[SuperToaster]

My iMac G3 is using 512 and that works fine, I think my Power Mac G4 has 768 or something I will have to check. they both work fine,

 

[Elfen]

OSX is at its best at 1GB, where it does not access the disk's Virtual memory as much as it would on smaller ram footprints. Thus making it faster.

 

[Gorgonops]

I had a Core 2 board with 2GB of RAM. I bumped it to 4, and it took 3 times as long at the windows logo to startup, and it felt sluggish in windows. Removed the extra 2GB and it was fine again. Odd.

 
Are you running 32 bit Windows or 64 bit? Even in the later case some "transition era" chipsets (like many used with Core 2 cpus) can have "issues" with large amounts of RAM. It's long to explain but basically it involves conflicts between trying to make a linear virtual allocation space for system RAM vs. the amount of the 4GB *physical* window that's used for PCI peripherals; Parallel PCI uses a 32 bit model and although PCIe supports 64 bit addressing there's still issues with virtually mapping those devices into a backwards-compatible space. Depending on your platform's PCIe fabric and what OS support you have for PCIe address routing going above 3GB of memory or so can force drivers to, for instance, disable DMA transfers, because part of the physical memory space isn't directly reachable to peripherals on the bus.
 
(If you look it up you can find some incredibly headache-inducing discussions about PCI Express chipset designs; many early/low end chipsets were *basically* still PCI chipsets with PCIe just sort of grafted on, while higher end/server chipsets will have more sophisticated hardware that can alleviate some of the problems.)
 
In any case, none of this applies to PowerPC Macs other than *possibly* G5s.