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Powerbook question

DarkAmeba

Senior member
I just got World of Warcaft and I am looking to play it on my 15" powerbook G4 1.67 w/128mb 9700. At the moment I only have 512mb of ram installed. Before I play, I am planning on upgrading the RAM. Here's the thing; I am very new to macs. I know that for a PC, 1GB is plently for games. Is the same true for a mac? Seems that many people feel that OSX works best on at least 1.5gb of ram. How true is this? I can get an extra 512mb stick for around $100 from crucial. I can get a gig stick from kingston for about $200 after rebate. Which upgrade would you recomend?
 
Play it first, you may not even need the gig. I have a PB 15" 1.25 G4 w/ 512 and it plays very well. I played WoW on my PB docked ( closed w/ external KB/Mouse and LCD ) at 1280x1024 for about a month while my PC was down waiting for parts. I found it to be very acceptabe, and it should be even better on yours.
 
I believe it was Confucius who once said, "You can never have enough RAM." Or maybe it was the Bible. I don't know. The moral of the story is, when was the last time you heard someone complaining about having too much RAM? If you can triple the RAM for $200, and you can afford it, why not? Just make sure you have the right kind, Macs are very fickle about which memory they accept.
 
I would go with the 1gb stick personally. OSX loves ram. That being said, WOW will play absolutely fine on 1gb of ram. But, to take advantage of OSX, especially if you're doing photo work or multimedia, you'll like the 1.5gb.

As for the brand of memory, crucial works fine. I have a 1gb kingmax pc2700 in my 1.5ghz 15" (previous rev to yours) and it's flawless. Most brands will work fine... macs aren't that picky...
 
I've heard that the magic number is 1 GB, not 1.5. But if World of Warcraft plays well on an older 15" PowerBook with 512 MB of RAM, it should be even better on the newest one. Don't be in too much of a rush to order the new memory, but do expect an improvement in general OS responsiveness (and probably World of Warcraft, too) if you go to 1 GB.
 
i had it running on a 1.33ghz 9700 64mb before all the patches came out and it was running fine too.
 
I will let you know come friday night when I install it. I have had a copy of WoW for a few weeks now... but can't bring myself to install before spring break. I don't want to fail!
 
If you're going to upgrade the memory, an upgrade to 1.5 in my opinion probably isn't worth the money. 1GB will do just fine for WoW and nearly everything else. Running WoW on my PBG4 1.67GHz, 1GB RAM, 9700 w/128MB and it runs great.
 
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