2007 iMac with 6GB Ram?

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Hi everyone this summer I add 128 gb SSD to my mid 2007 iMac and it's a best 36 dollar I ever spend! my machine work great with el Capitan. Photoshop, illustrator bit slow but work okay. I heard that my Mac can handle 6gb of ram, I already have 4. (2x2) and I think add more ram on it like 6. Is this necessary? Worth it? ( In my country these rams are pretty expensive..) If I add 6 gb ram adobe apps, safari can work better? Thanks… :Smirk:
 

Raz0rEdge

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The additional 2 GB of memory will not likely have a huge impact on the machine's performance. You are limited by the CPU power at the end of the day and also realize that El Cap is the latest version of the OS you can use with that machine. You might want to start thinking about getting a newer machine which get you updated hardware.
 
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2007 iMac with 6GB Ram?…
Is this necessary? Worth it? ( In my country these rams are pretty expensive..) If I add 6 gb ram adobe apps, safari can work better? Thanks…


We have and still use such a 2007 iMac with 6GB memory but just a WD Black HDD, and Activity Monitor.app would help give you an indication as to how its RAM/memory is being used, or short of, but adding to what Ashwin stated, it's also getting on in computer years to start adding any RAM, especially if it's fairly expensive where you live. Save the money for a more recent model may be better.




- Patrick
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Yes! it is possible to upgrade your ram to 6gb. I recommend you OWC Memory Upgrades for iMac.. OWC thoroughly tests all Mac models to see if Macs can take more RAM. Hope this helps you.
 

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Yes! it is possible to upgrade your ram to 6gb. I recommend you OWC Memory Upgrades for iMac.. OWC thoroughly tests all Mac models to see if Macs can take more RAM. Hope this helps you.

That wasn't the question. The question was would adding 2 additional GB of memory have an impact on the machine's performance.
 
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That wasn't the question. The question was would adding 2 additional GB of memory have an impact on the machine's performance.


Thinking about this a bit more, and considering that we use a 2007 iMac with 6GB memory but with a HDD, I really wonder if adding the extra 2GB of memory would even be noticeable considering they have a SSD installed that would probably be at least 2X faster than any HDD and that iMac also supports 3GB/s SATA bus speed I believe.

I may be out to lunch, but my thinking is that if the hard drive was ever needed for memory use, having the SSD installed would be almost as fast as if more memory was added.

Just an unfounded thought, but maybe someone has done such a test and posted it somewhere. I just don't know where.




- Patrick
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Raz0rEdge

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Exactly Patrick. Performance on a computer is characterized by (largely) 3 components. CPU, RAM and storage. If storage read/writes are slow, having a REALLY fast CPU or tons of RAM means nothing since you can't process lots of stuff and store temporary stuff for later processing. If your CPU is really slow, then it doesn't matter how much RAM or how fast you storage is since processing power is the bottleneck. If you have very limited RAM, you'll end up spending a lot of CPU cycles and storage write time making room for the applications and overall performance suffers.

So, upgrading from HDD to SSD speeds up the storage part. If your CPU was already fairly fast, then upgrading RAM to a larger number will yield a benefit.

A 2007 circa CPU is no match to anything that's come out in the past couple of years. That iMac is at best a Core2Duo CPU where's even the slowest current gen i3 (2 cores) will easily outperform it.
 
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Exactly Patrick. Performance on a computer is characterized by a (largely) 3 components. CPU, RAM an storage.


Thanks for the confirmation Ashwin.
Maybe that will also help the OP decide on their Mac "upgrade" path — if any for the time being…






- Patrick
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