topic Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB in Installation & update

Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

James Murray — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 15:47:00 GMT

For what it's worth...

I have been running AC9 on the PowerBook described below throughout the beta period, 1GB of RAM. Runs fine. Sure, the G5 is faster. (8.1 is slower.)

Long story short, I had one of my 512 DIMMs go bad this morning, took it out. I'll be running on 512MB until early next week.

Not fun.

Working in plan is no problem. If I rebuild a section window, even a small, simple one, AC hangs until I quit ALL other apps except the Finder. Then AC snaps out of it and finishes the rebuild.

Moral: The real minimum is 1GB.

Waiting on the FedEx guy,

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 18:16:47 GMT

James,

So how much RAM are you getting? Are you sticking with the 1GB minimum or laying out the BIG bucks to go for two. (Big bucks being about what I spent on 32MB about twelve years ago - and that was a deal.)

If you go up, I'd be interested to hear if it helps the performance.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

James Murray — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 19:19:53 GMT

I'm just replacing the 512. The 1GB module was over four times as much. At 3x I probably would have gone for it. Also I just upgraded the disk to a 5400 RPM 80GB. (I the back of my mind I wonder if the tech who installed it wasn't grounded and that's where my RAM went.)

It was the non-Apple DIMM, TechWorks. I'm doing Crucial this time.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 20:37:18 GMT

Yeah, it's hard to spend the money on those 1GB DIMMS. I'll probably get a G5 PowerBook before I upgrade this one.

Good source, Crucial has never failed me. The one time I bought elsewhere I had major problems.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Dwight — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 23:03:08 GMT

And in taking Matthew's advice regarding Crucial, they had a great price and a quality product.
If I had only put them in right.
Amazing force needed to seat RAM in a G5.

TIP: If RAM is not put into a G5 correctly the fans go full blast and a tiny ruby light comes on. Should be obvious there's a problem even if there is no smoke.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 11:44:11 GMT

A great place to buy upgrades and ram for Macs is Other World Computing at http://eshop.macsales.com/Specials/XLR8YourMac.cfm

I ordered ram from them and have never had any problems and the ram is cheaper that Crucial and CDW.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Karl Ottenstein — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:16:01 GMT

James wrote:
I'll be running on 512MB until early next week.

Not fun.

Working in plan is no problem. If I rebuild a section window, even a small, simple one, AC hangs until I quit ALL other apps except the Finder. Then AC snaps out of it and finishes the rebuild.

Moral: The real minimum is 1GB.

Interesting. 512MB on XP is just fine with 9 and earlier ... on my 1 GHz P3 Dell laptop. Max OS X is leaner than XP, so I wonder why the memory gluttony? (Of course, on my laptop, I don't run a zillion things at once as I do on my memory-heavy desktop.)

Karl

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Laszlo Nagy — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:05:51 GMT

Karl wrote:
James wrote:
I'll be running on 512MB until early next week.

Not fun.

Working in plan is no problem. If I rebuild a section window, even a small, simple one, AC hangs until I quit ALL other apps except the Finder. Then AC snaps out of it and finishes the rebuild.

Moral: The real minimum is 1GB.
Interesting. 512MB on XP is just fine with 9 and earlier ... on my 1 GHz P3 Dell laptop. Max OS X is leaner than XP, so I wonder why the memory gluttony? (Of course, on my laptop, I don't run a zillion things at once as I do on my memory-heavy desktop.)

Karl

When you have a large model, and use LightWorks with many light sources, reflections and refractions, plus soft shadows turned on, it will need quite a bit of memory. Then 1 GB will actually be needed. Having 512 MB of memory had my computer using the hard drive a lot while trying to acqiure enough memory to do the job.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Dwight — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 14:22:54 GMT

Having plenty of RAM [3.5 Gigulonz] myself, I notice a complex flythrough with dozens of light sources and millions of polygons [darn those interior designers and their vases and slumpy sofa cushions and bamboo!] doesn't exponentially slow the process down like in the old days. Must be the accessing more RAM that fixes it.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Dwight — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 07:48:42 GMT

I'm doing a serous flythrough right now - ArchiCAD is addressing 997 MB of RAM. And quite a bit of disk activity, too.

This, with a total of 3.5 GB RAM.

So there's your difference. at 768 I'd be hitting a ceiling....

and this flythru is just a reasonably well-appointed condo - nothing really big.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Dwight — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 08:51:14 GMT

money ain't for nothin'

if you were poor, you'd make smaller images, but really complex models where lots of RAM is essential for any processing aren't good learning tools because the grunt work necessary gets in the way of creative exploration.... so it is probably better to stick with simple stuff.
Get a larger display instead.

Re: Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

Dwight — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 09:06:26 GMT

RAM comes to play in two ways:

-- containing the assembled "model," as a crystal, not a parametric list.

-- containing the texture data and lighting maps - ray-tracing, phong shading, whatever....

once you make a rendering situation that goes beyond this RAM on hand, your unit writes to disk and slows the whole thing down - sometimes it simply can't calculate a solution because too much data must be swapped....

learning happens in interesting situations. I only really learn under financial pressure, like this current assignment.