Upgrade from 8gb to 16gb in i5 iMac?
- Thread starter cjj14u
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The only way to really know is to open up Activity monitor and look at the RAM usage when you're working with all of that. If you're not using a large percentage of your RAM, as far as I know it won't matter if you add 16GB. If you're using say, at most 4GB of your 8GB of RAM, then you'll still only use 4GB of the 16GB. (I could be wrong, but that's my understanding...) Now, upgrading to 16GB is certainly not useless, it will help "futureproof" your machine a bit longer 
But if you're not using it all, you probably won't notice the difference.
But if you're not using it all, you probably won't notice the difference.
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The only way to really know is to open up Activity monitor and look at the RAM usage when you're working with all of that. If you're not using a large percentage of your RAM, as far as I know it won't matter if you add 16GB. If you're using say, at most 4GB of your 8GB of RAM, then you'll still only use 4GB of the 16GB. (I could be wrong, but that's my understanding...) Now, upgrading to 16GB is certainly not useless, it will help "futureproof" your machine a bit longer
Short and sweet... "Seconded"
- Simon
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thirded. however i dont think you will see much difference right now. imovie and iphoto arent the most taxing of programs to run, and you already have a good 8GB of ram to go with, so in my opinion there is really no need to upgrade further.
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When looking at Activity Monitoray particular to the page in and page outs. If those two numbers are rather high it means a growing amount of data is being read/written to the hard drive. A certain amount of activity is inevitable the question is how high does it go over time.
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