pastrychef
Moderator
- Joined
- May 29, 2013
- Messages
- 19,460
- Motherboard
- Mac Studio - Mac13,1
- CPU
- M1 Max
- Graphics
- 32 Core
- Mac
- Classic Mac
- Mobile Phone
I been running 64 gig memory since 2013, I have not ever seen a need for more. The 90GB might be good with M2
I have swapped out my video cards from time to time, depending on what kind of upgrade cycle I am on. When GPU were overly bloated in price I stayed with the Vega 64 for a very long time. Honestly I did not upgrade anything in that window of time. While waiting for AS products to not be two months in the specs I wanted I did upgrade the GPU to tide me over. My Hack got a new CPU after 2 years and new GPU after 4 years, but not more memory or even drive space. I can easily push the Mac Book Pro with 32gb of memory to the point it shuts itself down. But I subsepct it has more to do with parallels, windows on arm, running x64 apps in emulation while running a very GPU intensive rendering software.
After about 4 hours vtdecoder goes off the rails and pushes its memory use to 200gb and the swap to 60gb...
View attachment 566031
When I worked in a corporate environment 20 years ago when the computers needed upgrading the IT department came threw grabbed the tower unplugged it, put the new tower in its place and plugged it in. Every 3 to 6 months they had a used hardware auction for the employees.
Same here, 64GB has been fine for me for the last 5-6 years. Prior to that, I had 32GB in my MacPro5,1. Depending on when I upgrade to a new system, I may or may not opt for more.
On my hacks, I didn't really change much other than GPU either. I was fine with my Vega 56 and later with my Radeon VII (which I ended up selling at the peak of the GPU shortage). The primary reason I swapped the Vega 56 for a Radeon VII and then a 6600 XT was because it sucked so much power and ran so damned hot. The 6600 XT was much more efficient and offered me enough performance for my needs. The 32 GPU cores of my M1 Max performs very similarly and is still fine for my needs. Zero complaints.
Running virtual machines can def eat up resources fast. Apple Silicon is probably not the best platform to use if you intend to run lots of VMs.
Yeah, all the IT depts I've known don't really do "upgrades". They just swap for higher specced systems.