IMac 27" Late 2012 - how much memory?

FlyTVR

FlyTVR

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The Mrs bought me an IMac - a lovely piece of kit.

Lightroom 5 and PS tend to slow it up massively. Very frustrating.

It only has 8gb and I was wondering if the answer is to get some more memory (upto 32gb I believe).

I'd love to hear experiences from other IMac users. The Apple world is all new to me! My PC flies with only 8gb (but does have an SSD).

Cheers.

Dav
 
LR is disk and CPU intensive, PS is memory and CPU intensive (only using disk when it runs out of memory).

LR doesnt use too much memory, only PS will use as much as you want to throw at it.
 
Dav, do you also have other apps running in the background while doing this? On a side note, a RAM upgrade is always handy, I bought an upgrade kit of 32 Gigs for around £60 on eBay if that helps, an SSD also helps tremendously but this will void your warranty unless you get it installed by an Apple approved upgrade center I believe!
 
Thanks for the info Neil and Dave.

Dave, yes, LR and PS are running side by side.

I actually ordered 32gb from Crucial this morning - more than £60 however - feeling a bit sick now! Agree on SSD. Just feel a bit bad as I know the Mrs spent an arm and a leg on a Mac, but it now looks like I have to spend even more to get the thing up to the spec of my £800 PC! :(

Thanks again.

Dav
 
[QUOTE="FlyTVR;5753482"
I actually ordered 32gb from Crucial this morning - more than £60 however - feeling a bit sick now!.

Dav[/QUOTE]

I wouldn't worry, you have ordered very good quality RAM!

You would be surprised at the issues cheap RAM can give you.
 
MarcM said:
I wouldn't worry, you have ordered very good quality RAM!

You would be surprised at the issues cheap RAM can give you.
Click to expand...

Phew :)

Should be with me tomorrow.

Anybody had experience with Thunderbolt / usb 3 SSDs?
 
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I use a mid 2010 imac 27", upgraded the cpu to an i7, the ram is only 8gb and added a 256gb SSD, it flies along with Lightroom 4 which I'd probably say the SSD helped the most with. Mechanical drives are so 1990's
 
Flightphoto said:
an SSD also helps tremendously but this will void your warranty unless you get it installed by an Apple approved upgrade center I believe!
Click to expand...

Not only that, it will make your fans run full all the time. And even Apple won't upgrade the drive on a 2102 iMac. :gag:

FlyTVR said:
Phew :)

Should be with me tomorrow.

Anybody had experience with Thunderbolt / usb 3 SSDs?
Click to expand...

I have a 27" 2012 iMac. I have some USB3 docks and a couple of SSD drives. What do you need to know? (Very hard to get decent thunderbolt enclosures BTW)
 
There is another issue causing the speed problems besides the HHD. Although you'll see an advantage in an ssd in the real world it won't make any difference to the speed you can work
 
I have the 27" with just 24gb ram installed, running cs6 and lightroom with safari open and itunes playing in the background most days and it's never had a slow down.

I also had the fusion drive option and tbh, I see no speed improvement from that, boot up and shut down times are still average to say the best of them and swapping tasks or programs isn't really that much quicker than the old 24" it replaced.
 
I was going to say, I never have any problems running CS6 and LR + Autocad 2013 at the same time. However, MS Office 2011 can slow things down but this is apparently a software bug common across any users running ML (Powerpoint lags a bit when I'm doing any presentation type work etc but if it's closed and restarted it's fine!)
 
I have a mid 2011 Imac 27 i5 with standard 1TB Hdd - it had 8gb (2x4) I got the16gb (2x8) Crucial upgrade kit for £90 and bunged it in dead easy. So now 24 gb Its not massively changed the day to day running but if you are using photoshop or anything RAM intensive it doesn't lag and rendering is instantaneous. Its a no brainer upgrade. Next one I will consider is an SSD when it slows down and is out of Applecare.
 
Do macs have a windows style task manager which shows you the resources currently being used? That would give you an indication whether you were maxing out the RAM or the CPU.
 
daugirdas said:
macs will eat all the memory the can so max it out. I have 16GB and that does get full after a couple hours in LR.
Click to expand...

something is wrong then. With LR5 I can't get LR to use more then 5GB ever, and LR4 rarely gets over 3.5gb
 
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