Testing My Apple MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM

8gbMacBookProAnyone out there have an Apple MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM?  No?  Don’t tell me you are going to let a Microsoft Windows evangelist totally beat you to the finish line on this one!!!

All kidding aside, I decided to pull the two Kingston 4GB SoDIMMs out of my Lenovo ThinkPad T61p and test it with the machines I thought could handle it.  Since nearly all of the laptops I have are Intel “Santa Rosa” PM965 or GM965 mobile chipset based machines, unless the OEM did something specifically to block it I had high confidence they would work. 

This includes the 15.4” Apple MacBook Pro I have.  Here’s a screenshot from my Mac showing it all booted up and running.  My Mac booted without issue and ran perfectly well. This is the original .tiff created by Grab.

For those of you running Parallels, Fusion or other memory hungry applications, I’m sure you’ll be interested in the implications.  Now you can run a number of virtual machines with some pretty large memory allocations.  I would imagine an application like Final Cut Studio would really dig the extra memory as well.

A couple of things that come up when I post stuff like this you can’t verify.  First, you won’t find this in the specs at apple.com.  That doesn’t mean I’m a liar or trying to pull some stunt with Photoshop.  I mean think about it, why would I do such a thing? 

Second, more memory doesn’t automatically equal more speed from the machine.  The 4GB modules are still running at the same speed as the Samsung modules that are normally in my mac.  However, because you have more capacity, you now have the ability to run certain applications in a more efficient manner.  For instance, now you could allocate considerably more memory to a Windows Vista, Windows XP or Linux virtual machine.  That is going to make them run faster.

[UPDATE for 7/6/2008] The model MacBook Pro I have is the late 2007 machine. It's model MA896LL/A and the exact specification for it are at https://support.apple.com/kb/SP13. Your MacBook Pro will need to be this machine or later to support more than 4GB of memory.

[UPDATE for 7/7/2008]   I have had so many emails from internal and external that I have decided to do a long term test on my MacBook Pro.  Yep, I pulled the 4GB sticks back out of my ThinkPad and they're back here in my MacBook Pro.  So I'll run with them for a couple of weeks or longer and see if I encounter any issues. First up, run some virtual
machine testing with some large allocations...