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Since the price on a 2 GB MacBook Pro-compatible SO-DIMM recently entered the atmosphere on NewEgg.com, I went for it. I’m very, very pleased. My MacBook Pro generally performed well with 2 GB, but when I launched Parallels, I’d have to trim down my working set to make sure my system didn’t crawl.

After the upgrade, I can leave my full OS X working set up while Parallels does its thing and it all works fine (allocating 700 MB to a WinXP VM). Once thrashing starts during an OS X / Parallels session, man, game over.

Published by Ben Galbraith

Entrepreneur, executive, and investor; octo-dad; former Googler, now VP Product at Segment.com

16 thoughts on “3 GB is the MacBook Pro Sweet Spot”

  2. I just upgraded to 3gb as well 2 weeks ago. I concur with you that it makes all the difference. I now leave Parallels running all the time in the background, as opposed to starting and stopping it as needed.

  3. I have been tempted for a while as 2Gb is just not enough. I am curious if we can go to 4Gb once Leopard is out. The laptop will take 4Gb but only address about 3.3Gb as 700Mb is needed for mapping hardware and Tiger is only using 32bit addressing. Leopard should bring 64bit addressing so should then have full 4Gb? Hope its true 🙂

  4. Jasper: Interesting, I read http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304662 and came away thinking that none of that last 4 GB would be addressed by the MBP; if 30% of it can be, that’s tempting, too. 😉

    I was under the impression that the bottleneck is not in the OS as Mac Pro’s can already address ungodly amounts of memory–after all, Tiger is 64 bit with a large number of 32 bit subsystems. Interesting to see…

  6. Thanks for the heads up, I had given up on 2GB DIMMs and was resigned to thrashing with Parallels.

    Have you seen any performance decrease? Using unmatched DIMMs means it can’t interleave, which drops the performance (a bit).

    Of course, nothing’s slower than thrashing 🙂

    Regarding 4GB, the macbook is only capable of addressing 3GB of RAM. This is a hardware limitation, not a software one. According to this article, it will address a small amount of the 4th GB, but most of it overlaps with other parts of the memory map and gets ignored. This apparantly is an Intel issue, not an Apple issue:

    http://news.softpedia.com/news/MacBook-Pro-Core-2-Duo-Limitations-39006.shtml

    I wonder if the performance increase of interleaving justifies adding a second 2GB DIMM just to get the interleaving? Barefeats thinks not:

    http://www.barefeats.com/mbcd6.html

  7. I’m wondering if this module works in the older MBP’s with the Core Duo chips. Looking at the specs for this module, it seems like it’s only for the Core 2 Duo chips.

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