Mac Memory Requirements for Photoshop

[jimrock]

I am getting ready to by a 24 in. iMac with 2 GB of RAM. Is this enough to

efficiently run Photoshop CS3? I am debating whether to buy it with 1 GB and

then replace it with 4 GB of after market RAM.

 

I would prefer to buy the computer with the installed 2 GB of RAM as I can pick

it up from the Apple store later today or tomorrow rather than having it

shipped to me if I have to customize the order. But also don't want to find

out later that I really needed more RAM.

 

Thanks in advance for the advice.

[ellis_vener_photography]

I am debating whether to buy it with 1 GB and then replace it with 4 GB of after market RAM."

 

yes do that. Then set the memory allocation for PsCS3 to 10-80%

 

I get my RAM from OWC.

[phoneguy]

Here's a second for <a href="http://www.macsales.com/">OWC</a>. I put 3 gigs in my

iMAC. Good cheap memory. If you only get 1 gig of ram, keep in mind that they will probably

ship it with two 512's.

[jonny_mac]

DON'T buy your RAM from Apple. I had 2GB in my MBP, and upgraded to 2x2GB for crucial ram for $113. Apple's cost was around $700 or so.

[Uhooru]

OWC is incredibly inexpensive. Get 4 gigs, or Crucial for a little more. Just get 2 2gb modules, don't worry about the 1 gig that came with it. If you're concerned about wasting it, then just sell it.

[rogerjporter]

i run cs3 on a 20 inch imac with the original 1 gig of ram. i get the pinwheel once in a while,

but all in all i am shocked at how smooth the operation is. i 4th the motion however that

you buy after market memory and not support apples 2x-4x markup on it. you can buy

lightroom or some cool plugins with the money you save.

[kelly_flanigan1]

Here we have a 20" iMac with 2 gigs of ram and it has CS2; its abit hard to understand since it is a Mac. The prior mac I fooled with was a SE30. Before that is was one that had Photoshop 2 with a few megs of ram; we went from 2 to 4 to 8!

[stephen_bay]

I am running an older MBP with 2gigs of ram and CS3. Works fine for editing RAW with maybe

a few layers. Biggest image I've worked on is a few hundred megabytes (single layer) and no

real slow downs. I suspect memory may be an issue if I try to do things like stitch say 10-20

images into a panorama (especially if I am working with 16bits).

[will_hammond]

Kelly you moved to a Mac? When did you make the change back?

[will_hammond]

FYI, Photoshop will only recognize the first 3gb of RAM in your machine so if you have more than 3gb installed (more like 4gb, your OS will need RAM as well) you can increase the amount of RAM allocated is 3gb (net). You can do this by raising the allocation to greater than 70% and watching the actual RAM allocated not the percentage.

[kelly_flanigan1]

Will; I have many different computers; about 2 dozen; one is a Mac thus only one toe in the dark side.:) For ripping files on ancient box one uses NT3.51 thats from 1994/5. I also have DOS boxes; a few win98se machines; many many win2000 boxes, some XP machines. With windows 98se the *effective* ram thats useable seems to be about 512megs; ie if a box has 768 or 1 gig the extra ram seems useless with our tests. With NT4 and win2000; 2 gigs of ram works swell; plus win2000 seems to be less bloaded than XP; than Vista too. With XP there is the hokey switch that allows above 2 gig of ram; say 3; but this ram seems to be not used as well as the part below 2 gigs. With a 32 bit system you are boxed into less than 4 gigs; sometimes with a PC there is software crud loaded in the attic; is the 3 to 4 gig area. With CS on our PC's 2 gigs is all she wrote; with CS2 one can used above 2 gigs if one has the hokey XP switch added. CS3 requires xp or vista. I recented bought XP 64bit to play around with to explore more ram with ps.The imac 20" is a dual coreabout 2.2"ghz with 2 gigs of ram with CS2 and illustrator; a nice box; abit foreign for a pc user.

[will_hammond]

Kelly, I'm on the opposite side our your layout. I have about two dozen machines all but 4 are Macs. Running CS2 on an Intel Mac has proven to be grueling, but CS3 on the exact same machine (CS3 is all new native code) has proven to be easily 3 times faster on most processes. All 3 of the machines that we upgraded to Vista got bricked, but the new Dell machine we bought with Vista has had very few problems.

 

Did you happen to see the article a few weeks ago about Rambus' new 1TB memory chip that is 5 times faster than the PC2-5300 ram (the real bottle neck in computing)? Once a 64 bit version Photoshop is released (can't tell due to N.D.A.) we could see some smokin' machines that could work exclusively in RAM (2TB can be addressed in 64 bit). Neat stuff!