All other things being equal, what is the difference in power consumption of iMac with 8GB of RAM and iMac with 16 GB RAM?
iMac – Power Consumption of iMac
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Best Answer
It depends on which model of iMac it is as the various models have differents types of RAM - for example DDR2, DDR3, LPDDR3 and LPDDR4. In particular make note that some models use LPDDR RAM, where the "LP" stands for Low-Power.
The latest mid-2017 iMac uses PC4-19200 DDR4 SO-DIMM RAM modules. Here the difference in power usage between 8 GB and 16 GB is approximately 3 watts.
The difference between in power usage in having 1 x 16 GB, vs 2 x 8 GB, vs 4 x 4 GB modules is negligible.
Note that the mid-2017 27" iMac consumes about 217 watts when the CPU is maxed out, so the RAM power usage is very small compared to the rest of the system.