Minimum RAM Requirement should be 1GB

[James Murray]

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,

[Anonymous]

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.

[James Murray]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Dwight]

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.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Karl Ottenstein]

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

[Laszlo Nagy]

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.

[Dwight]

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.

[Dwight]

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.