Upgrading Memory and Hard Drive
in your MacBook Pro 15"

Which offers better performance?
RAM, or a fast Hard Drive?

More Memory can make all the difference and these testing results and benchmarks are here to give an idea of just how much. More memory is consistently better, but be upgrading with a matched pair or one module at a time - pretty much whatever additional memory you end up with, you'll notice the difference it makes.

Get More Info/Purchase Memory & Hard Drive Upgrades for your MacBook Pro

Apple MacBook Pro 15" Core Duo / Core 2 Duo Memory Testing of 1.0GB, 2.0GB, 3.0GB and 4.0GB configurations by Other World Computing.

Photoshop CS3 Results

Adobe Photoshop CS3 is a common, Intel-native iteration of the popular image editing program.

This test measures the time (in seconds) it takes to execute a custom 21-step action script using Adobe Photoshop CS3. Lower times are better.

Photoshop certainly uses the hard drive as scratch disk space, even with lots of system RAM. The 2.4GHz system barely eeked out a win in the higher RAM configuration tests.

"Stress Test" Results

This test also times how long it takes Adobe Photoshop CS3 to run a series of 21 actions. However, in addition to Photoshop, the iTunes Visualizer is also set to run. This generally taxes both the video card and the processor. Lower times are better.

As one would expect, more memory, and a faster hard drive = faster computer all around.

"RAM Hog" Results

This test times how long it takes to run our standard 21-step Photoshop action in Photoshop CS3 when 50% of the installed RAM is taken up with another program. Lower times are better.

Notice how the faster hard drive truly improves performance of the slower computer - even beating the faster processor in low memory situations. Obviously using the higher RPM hard drive as RAM swap space improves performance.

Halo Results

In order to heavily tax the video card, we ran the time demo of the Intel-native version of the popular game, Halo.

Results are the average frame rate (in frames per second) achieved. Higher results are better.

The faster hard drive really shines here because Halo hits the hard drive so much for it's graphics data it is displaying.

XBench Results

XBench is a standardized utility for measuring the performance of your computer, as compared to a "baseline" computer. (More information and the application, itself, can be found here.)

For this test, we checked all the options except for the Disk Test, as it was the only one that did did not either touch System memory or Video Memory. Higher Point results are better.