Ram upgrade

Iam currently upgrading the ram on my Imac. I have heard many diffrent versions of how i can do this. Iam confused so iam coming to you guys for help. My imac can take a total of 3gb. So i ordered 1-1gb stick. and 1-2gb stick. Now i have read certain stuff about matched sticks? unmatched sticks? And then i have read i can actually Upgrade to 4gb and it would not slow down the imac or cause any disruption in my system. Please advise. I have not made then install yet. Thanks so much guys..

Try looking it up on Crucial's site, they're usually pretty good at telling you what you need for your model, and obviously you can buy it from almost anywhere.

thanks

Thats were i bought it. They scaned my system and they i bought what came up as i described earlier. But then i read some articles about matching and unmatching sticks affected the speeds. I ,ight just be second guessing the way i made my purchase.

I had 2x1GB and upgraded to 1x1GB + 1x2GB. It's true you lose performance because they are not longer paired. But the extra GB makes up for it and then some. The system as a whole is faster. A very good investment.

I had the same problem as you but in MBP land. The simple answer is the machine only reads 3GB but 4GB is faster. It is apparently 8-15% faster.

giulio said:

I had 2x1GB and upgraded to 1x1GB + 1x2GB. It's true you lose performance because they are not longer paired. But the extra GB makes up for it and then some. The system as a whole is faster. A very good investment.

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See this is were i get lost. Were do i exactly loose performance? and how is it made up if its lost? Sorry if i am a little slow with this. thanks

Well, its similar to a highway. Matched pairs will operate in dual channel mode, basically giving you two lanes of traffic through the highway. If you put an unmatched pair in then it shuts down one lane and you have less throughput, however, by adding an extra gigabyte, you effectively have enough memory space to negate the lost throughput.

got ya thanks