Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks How much RAM for 27" iMac?

I'm about to order a Quad-Core Intel Core i7 27" iMac to replace one of our aged machines. It will be doing a lot of work with photos and accessing a lot of family history and other historical databases over the Internet. Is 8Gb RAM overkill? I hope to use the machine for a long time and want to include enough RAM to anticipate reasonably foreseeable future needs. Past history says we tend to flog our machines to do whatever they are capable of doing. As capability increases, we tend to do things with the machines that we didn't do before. We do not expect to use professional video or audio editing software. Suggestions regarding a reasonable amount of RAM would be gratefully received.

I'd hold off and see how the new iMac performs with the OEM basic RAM config. At a later date, when third party 4 GB modules drop in price, it may be more tantalizing.

Given the fact corporate bean counters are often loathe to allocate money for upgrades, and assuming in your case it would be easier to buy the additional memory at the same time as the new iMac, I would be inclined to go with 8GB RAM. You can get a matched pair of compatible 2GB DIMMs for under $100 (half of what Apple charges for the additional 4GB) and that seems pretty reasonable to me.

I took your advice and ordered 4Gb from OWC for a total of 8Gb in the new machine. Now, I'll start looking for the delivery truck. It's an i7, so I'll not hold my breath while waiting. MacRumors claims they've started shipping.