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Ive got a laptop that currently has 4gb of ram installed, looking through the activity monitor i can see that its always almost full, so im going to upgrade it.
The question is whether to go for 8gb or 16gb, my thoughts were to buy one 8gb module, install it and see if thats fast enough, if not buy another 8gb so ill have 8gb - 8gb
installed .
My only concern with this is that ive heard its not a good ideas to have unequal amount of ram ie. 2gb - 4gb
, does the same count for having one large module installed and the other empty so you would have 8gb - empty
?
1Sam, this question has been asked several times before. The very brief answer is: if you get two similar memory modules then you can use dual channel mode for a slight speed gain. (About 5%, though this varies per program tested). Adding more RAM will also give you a speed gain. Most of the time more RAM beats less RAM in d.c. mode. (So 4GB+8GB is better than 2x 4GB in dual mode) And ofc. 2x 8GB modules is even better and more expensive. – Hennes – 2013-09-29T13:36:09.470
It's best to have 2x 4GB if you want 8GB as this allows dual-channeling which results in a slight performance improvement. – Jeffrey – 2013-09-29T14:23:02.313