Question Mini ram-upgrade performance:

Has anyone who had 512 of ram noticed a major difference upon upgrading to 1 gig?

I bought some PQi ram from tigerdriect.ca, but had to send it back because it didn't work properly. So now I'm just waiting.

Anyone wanna fill me in?

I noticed a difference between 512mb and 1GB, but it really comes down to whether or not you are using that much. Check the system monitor utility, set it to monitor memory usage, if you current memory doesn't get full very often then going to 1GB won't help much.

What stick of PQI did you get that didn't work? I have had good luck with that brand.

Heck, I wonder If I'd benefit from 512 even. Using 256 right now. MynameIs, I only have 1 extra slot, right?

JSchultz said:

Heck, I wonder If I'd benefit from 512 even. Using 256 right now. MynameIs, I only have 1 extra slot, right?

Click to expand...

You only have 1 slot, not 1 extra slot. If you want to upgrade you have to buy a new stick and remove the old one.

:robot: Thats my only beef so far with my Mini is the memory slot situation. At least two would have been nice so you don't have to remove RAM. Rats it's expensive enough without removing. I bought my Mini with 512 installed and a 100 Gb HD. I would love to upgrade to 1 Gb of RAM, but then what do I do with the 512? Ebay it and hope it sells or sit back and wait?

mynameis said:

You only have 1 slot, not 1 extra slot. If you want to upgrade you have to buy a new stick and remove the old one.

Click to expand...

I have 1gb PC3200 DDR in my mini and a Toshiba hdd. The two upgrades gave me a considerable increase where I find that on desktop applications it is as fast as my 12" PowerBook. I created a tutorial on upgrading ram and hdd in a mac mini, as you can see from the Tutorial i stuck with Hynix PC3200 DDR as the original 256mb stick was also Hynix PC3200 DDR. As for performance difference between 256 and 512, definetly, and 512mb to 1gb, once again is a big difference when using multiple programs.

Regards,

.Joel

if you want faster speeds get a new harddrive and replace your minis 4,200rpm 80 gig or if you have the 5,400 rpm 40 gig with a 7,200 rpm harddrive. then you will notice a big jump in speed.

7200 RPM 2.5in hard drives are so expensive. If the mini was just slightly bigger enough to hold a 3.5in HD and have a 2nd ram slot, it would have so much more potential and a bit cheaper without giving up much.

To fit an extra Ram Slot in the MINI as tight as things are right now could only be done by going to SoDimm's like Laptops use. Problem is SoDimms are usually more expensive. I have no problem with the one slot. It's so crapmed in the MINI now I doubt they could add anything more. With 2 SoDimm DDR slots it could go to 2GB though!

The 1GB makes a lot of difference for me but I am a power user on a budget and need all the RAM I can get for what I do. For the average user who does not do the work I do and open a lot of apps at the same time, 512Megs is fine. 256 Megs is too little. Run 2 things then open iTunes and do some work and I got skipping of the music as it swapped to the HDD. 512 is a Good sweet spot for OSX and the Mini unless you do crazy things like I do.

Upping the Hard Drive speed once you are at 512 Megs will make a larger difference for most users in speed. I went with Firewire external drive as like Mynameis pointed out, 7200 RPM 2.5" drives are not cheep at all right now!