Max RAM for an early 2011 MBP 13" i5?

milltown wrote: »

Looking for the wisdom of the brethren on this:

Looking at RAM upgrades for my MBP and iMac, I've been on to Crucial and confirmed that the RAM is interchangeable between the two. Original plan was to upgrade the MBP and pop the two 2GB sticks that come out into the iMac. Handily I'll have the option to put the bigger sticks in the iMac if I start to lean on that more in the future. But for upgrading the MBP, Apple sites all seem to say that 8GB is the max it will take. Numerous other sites, including Crucial, are saying that it will take 16GB though (2*8).

Do I take Apple's word for it, or do I believe the others (who, obviously, are trying to sell RAM)? Why would Apple play down the potential of their machine?

I'm not sure if you can swap iMac for MBP RAM. Think they are different sticks.

I have 8GB of RAM in my model (The same age quad core i7 15" Model) Absolutely no need for more in my eyes. It would be pointless regardless, as your hard drive becomes the limiting factor. I have the standard 5400rpm drive. My last Machine, a 13" MBP had a 7200RPM MomentusXT Semi Solid State with 8GB of RAM. I'd put money on it was faster than my current set up. It would certainly out boot an i3 13" MBP.

Theoretically, your machine can address 64GB of RAM as its a 64bit OS. The problem is, you can't get 64GB sticks yet You can certainly put 16GB of RAM in. That I can assure you.

If your after speed, and semi-future proof, I'd go with 8GB. Then get a MomentusXT Drive. They are excellent but be warned, changing the drive will affect battery life considerably. I lost about 60mins of battery going from the standard to the XT.

By the time your machine is in need for replacement, a proper SSD will have dropped dramatically in price and size will be more affordable. In my opinion anything less than 512GB of SSD is pointless, but they are currently €700+ Same goes for 16GB of RAM.

Remember, more RAM does not equal more speed if your hard drive isn't keeping up.

A good resource too for checking which RAM and max RAM etc is an app called mactracker, http://www.mactracker.ca/ available in Mac App store, it has details on every mac and every Apple product. I would trust what the max they say is.

I think the reason Apple say max 4gb etc is at the time that Mac came out it was the max you could configure RAM to when ordering it and it was the max test. If I remember right there was a the old style mac mini that they said max was 4gb but could take 8gb but was unstable with this much and a later a firmware update resolved this although they still stated 4gb as max