Today I installed an a 4GB RAM upgrade to my MacPro. The MacPro is one of the first generation, it has two dual-core Intel Xeon processors running at 2.66 GHz.
I had ordered the system with 4 GB RAM (4 x 1GB), so there were still four DIMM slots left (they must be installed in pairs).
Over the past few months I have been fairly unhappy about performance on my MacPro, especially when running Aperture. This won't solve all of the problems. The other two that I have identified are that I need a faster GPU and I need to somehow resolve my disk access issues. On the first one I had made the mistake of ordering the
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT with the system, thinking I wasn't going to be doing any heavy 3D graphics work (or gaming). Well, it turns out Aperture (and Core Image) use the GPU for all of their computation, so my MacPro actually feels dog slow running
. Recently I tried
(which I got via the
sale with 11 other OSX apps for $47). Pixelmator is even worse than Aperture, to the point that it is almost unusable.
My second problem is that my disk is thrashing a lot. So I've been monitoring memory utilization and have noticed that I have also been running very low on physical RAM when running Aperture and a few other apps at the same time (usually I have Skype, Adium, Colloquy, Firefox, Thunderbird, The Missing Sync, Activity Monitor and maybe even Preview up at the same time, and occasionally I'll add iTunes). This should relieve much of the physical memory issue. Now I need to look at the general disk access issues, I hear it grinding way too much even when there's plenty (i.e. over 2GB) of physical RAM available.
The RAM was from Crucial. The 4GB upgrade that I installed was part #
CT579443My second problem is that my disk is thrashing a lot. So I've been monitoring memory utilization and have noticed that I have also been running very low on physical RAM when running Aperture and a few other apps at the same time (usually I have Skype, Adium, Colloquy, Firefox, Thunderbird, The Missing Sync, Activity Monitor and maybe even Preview up at the same time, and occasionally I'll add iTunes). This should relieve much of the physical memory issue. Now I need to look at the general disk access issues, I hear it grinding way too much even when there's plenty (i.e. over 2GB) of physical RAM available.
The RAM was from Crucial. The 4GB upgrade that I installed was part #
which cost $269.99. It came as two 2GB DIMMs, and the heat sinks look identical to the stock Apple ones that came with the system memory out of the factory. It was trivial to install. I just strapped on an anti-static strap (which did not come with the memory), opened the side door, pulled out the top memory riser card and seated them in. I then pushed the riser card back in, closed the door and powered up. That's all there was to it.
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