Mac Memory do i need it

Not long ago i ask a question about mac memory and how much I need.

I am still confused on how much I need 2,3,or 4GB I have had an email from Crucial and there advise was to purchase 4gb due to the price etc.

Now I have ask a very good friend of mine who been using a mac for years and his advise is I would be wasting my money on purchaseing any sort of memory as I would not use it.

I use the mac for web browsing,building my website and trading on e-bay but I also like to convert video and then stream it to the xbox 360 via connect360 I have notice I can plug in a usb hard drive to the xbox360 and run my video dircetly from the usb hard drive and display it on my 40" hd tv.

So i am now convering a video to HD ( hd.264 ? ) and then play that via the hard drive plug in to the xbox 360 but so far it taken over7 hrs with around 30% left to convert now my my imac is an iMac 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (20-inch) MA876LL now if i max the memory to 4gb will it be better or faster at converting my videos to HD I am using Toast 9 to convert can anyone advise me that if i did Max it out would be better at what i am doing or do you agree with my friend that I would be wasting my money.

Please advise as no one like to waste money and it might be better spent else were

converting the video should be faster with more memory (unless there is something weird about video converting I don't know about), but is the price worth it to you?

I upgraded to the max memory from Crucial my macbook could handle and love it. It makes processing photos much faster and now I can run parallels without getting annoyed.

hughes051 said:

Not long ago i ask a question about mac memory and how much I need. Please advise as no one like to waste money and it might be better spent elsewhere

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Short answer - there is no such thing as too much RAM (for your particular model of computer). MBasile makes a good point - is it worth it to you? Maximum RAM usually means maximum benefit/enjoyment.

I personally think 2GB is the sweet spot for OS X. It should be the bare minimum if you want to have a fast and enjoyable Mac experience.

I decided to max it to 4gb as i got 30days return if it is no good

Kash said:

I personally think 2GB is the sweet spot for OS X. It should be the bare minimum if you want to have a fast and enjoyable Mac experience.

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Agreed. Converting video to h.264 HD is extremely CPU intensive. nVidia are working on a GPU assisted version of the software to do this conversion, but as things stand, it takes many at least 3x as long to convert this, as the movie lasts, even with a 3ghz quad-core.