I would not have a load of safari tabs open and Photoshop open normally - it makes sense to keep thing lean and mean but obviously you need to have the tools open that you need in order to do the job, in my case that is usually Safari (1 or 2 tabs), Evernote on top of SU and Layout. Heres my system - the only safari tab I have open is this one (memory hog!) 0)ġ sketchup window open and Photoshop open just to put this graphic together - 8GB, you are going to be paging alot!
But if you want SU performance increases as a single running application, you have to upgrade the things I mentioned in my first response. If you like having all your applications open, then go with the RAM as it gives SU the memory it needs without having to page blocks of memory to the drive. Like I said it depends on how you use your system. And in that case I would upgrade the CPU. I would tend to have a few tabs open and SU, since that was what I was working on at the time. If it was me, I wouldn’t expect my system to be running 20 tabs in Safari, SU, Mail+other apps all at once. I was only providing system information that more RAM doesn’t increase your performance like a CPU clock speed increase does, unless the system has memory maxed out already. How are you planning to use your system? Will you be running SU alone? Or do you need other applications running at the same time? What are you currently used to with your system? That can give you an idea of if 16GB of RAM makes more sense that a CPU upgrade.