Is An Extra 1gb Of Ram Worth It?, Need some real-world info on MacBook Pro performance Options

[bennybob]

Hi everybody,

The time has come for me to graduate from a Tascam 2488 (24-track all-in-one DAW) to a Mac based DAW. I'm about to pull the trigger and get a MacBook Pro this week as well as Logic Pro 7.2.

Specs:
17" MacBook Pro 2.33 GHz C2D
7200 RPM 100GB drive
2 GB RAM standard

My dilemma is in opting for more RAM. Apple wants another $650 CDN to max the machine out at 3 GB, but I'm not sure if I really need it at this point or not.

I intend to have this machine act as a very portable studio, only using an external drive for backups and very large projects. most of the time I would like to be composing/recording/ tweaking out on the deck or on the living room sofa with not much more than the MBP, a compact MIDI keyboard and an acoustic guitar. I plan to have track counts between 20 and 40 and use a healthy dose of plug-ins and effects. It would be about 70% on-board synths and loops and 30% recorded audio.

So should I spring for 3 gigs of RAM now or wait and buy a 3rd party RAM upgrade at a later date? The other hitch is that the stock MBP RAM is a 2x1GB setup filling both slots, meaning that to upgrade later, I would have to spring for a single 2GB card and have it replace one of the 1GB cards, leaving me with a useless 1GB to sell on eBay or something.

Anyway, long story short - can I get the performance I need out of just 2GB or should I bite the bullet, get the extra 1GB and relax, knowing I've maxed it out as much as I could?

Thanks in advance for any and all responses!

[GordyC]

2 Gb of RAM should do you well, but the more plug-ins that you have linked to your files the more RAM you are going to use. I currently run a Mac Mini with a mere 512MB of RAM and have had no problems what so ever. It all resides in how you set up your mac environment the more background programs you have running such as picture scrolling backgrounds or pixel intensive backgrounds that will keep the cpu and the RAM busy while you are trying to run your DAW. so streamline your environment and 2Gb's should serve you well. Just my two cents, but then again if you have the cash spring for the extra you can never have too much RAM.