TUAW Mythbusting: Core 2 Duo with 3GB RAM slower than with 2GB?

Remember the Apple motto 'It just works'? it seems we have all been sucked into the vortex of endless nuance and discussion of how to keep our Macs on an even keel, let alone improving performance. How did this happen?

Follow up on my last post:

Speaking of consitency of results: Freshly booted iMac Core 2 Duo with unmatched memory sticks (1GB+512GB) inside, geekbench result 235.6.

What´s to learn of this? Don´t give a rat´s ass about benchmarks. Just throw as much memory at OS X as possible and both you and your system will be happy.

Best
M.

Okay, lets put some benchmarking into play. Even though they usually don´t say much about the real life. I´ll use geekbench.

On my iMac Core 2 Duo, 2.16GHz, i benchmarked with 2 matched 512MB sticks and with 1.5GB of total (thus, 1GB+512MB). My findings:

result with 1GB: 233.2 geekbench score
result with1.5GB: 222.6 geekbench score

Once again, that doesn´t say an awful lot. The machine boots up faster, doesn´t feel slower, and for me, that´s ok. when using the parallels desktop build 1970 with win XP, i find that the swap file gets smaller by about 2 Gigabytes when having more memory in the iMac. So much for now, -and I think i´ll buy another 1 Gig stick.

Its still not clear!

We need xbench results for this one!
Dual Channel is important.. at least when using Windows (bleh) you could see a noticable difference

Instead of testing 2+1 vs 2+0, they SHOULD test 1+1 vs 2+0. The results from testing a 2GB system versus a 3GB system completely invalidate the results.

edit:the CD supports 2gb at full speed 2x1gb
NOT as I had previously posted
and that $ is a 4

Also the CD takes the exact RAm as the C@D - none of the actually dpeneds on the processor, btw

Also in the literal sense of the word you CAN always put a larger stick in your computer, will it reconigize all of it, maybe not, but ...

I would think that in cases where you require 3 GB of RAM for an app, if there was a speed decrease when using mis-matched modules, it would still be at least an order of magnitude faster than swapping to the HDD.

Ok for what I know
is that
the C2d supports 3gb at full speed 667mhz DDR2
the CD supports 2gb at full speed 1x2gb
however the zCD will support 4gb 2x$ at 533mhz
so I assume the the C2d supports @ least 4gb

Slots
IMac HAS 2 slots, so do the laptops
I've heard that the 3gb is actually a 2x2gb config, but at full speed only 3gb are seen
matched pairs do help


Note: I'm only a 14yr old Mac finatic so any of this info could be wrong

While perhaps the performance gain from matched memory is negligible on a MacBook Pro, on Macbooks it should matter, as there's the graphics hardware using the memory, too, and consuming bandwidth. I think that's why apple sells MacBooks only with matched pairs, MBPs not.

Jojo

Dual channel RAM was always kind of a boondoggle... I don't think I've ever seen a benchmark that shows more than a 5% increase in speed, and even then only in a couple very specific tasks.