Apple Memory

chrisforshaw said:
I was looking at upgrading the memory on my iMac to 8gb from 4gb. I was wondering if there is any major difference between using a 3rd party upgrade like one from Crucial and the much more expensive Apple upgrade.
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Absolutely none whatsoever other than the horrific price difference :)

Has the 8Gb come down now, it was silly money when Wail was looking at it.
 
Which iMac do you have? mine can only take 4gb max. I upgraded from 2 to 4 using Crucial and its been great
 
cowasaki said:
Absolutely none whatsoever other than the horrific price difference :)
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Thats pretty much it, a price difference.

I upgraded the 2GB DDR3 ram in my mac mini to 4GB using ram from my local pc shop, and the laugh was when i took the ram out of the mac mini, it was the same make as what i had bought, only 2 x 1gb instead of the 2 x 2gb i had just paid for.
 
chrisforshaw said:
I've got the latest all singing and dancing top of the range iMac 3.06ghz :clap:
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Git ;), they brought that out about 2 weeks after I bought mine. The Crucial memory is fine though, only trouble is I had to bin the 2x1gb modules that were in it already.
 
chrisforshaw said:
I've got the latest all singing and dancing top of the range iMac 3.06ghz :clap:

To buy the iMac with 8gb already installed is £800 extra. It works out at £160 to buy it separately and it's about £36 on Crucial.
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Are you sure its the right RAM? Last I looked it was like £300 for 4G of DDR3!
 
Yes, I was talking about it being silly money. You need to check the specific type of RAM.
 
It's because the iMac uses SODIMMs (ie. Laptop RAM) and hardly anything else uses DDR3 SODIMM still (largely because it doesn't achieve much over DDR2 for most stuff atm) and also only has 2 slots, so to get 8GB you need a pair of 4GB sticks which are considerably more expensive than 2GB sticks.

2x2GB to give 4GB is only £60 or so in comparison to £270 for a 1x4GB setup.
 
It's always better to have 2xnGB and not 1xnGB with regards to performance. I also upgraded my old Macbook and new MBP with Crucial RAM and have no issues.
 
Definitely, I was just drawing comparison between the prices of 2GB and 4GB modules and thus why 8GB is so expensive in an iMac with just 2 slots.
 
Yeah, apparently Apple is not very clear if the more recent hardware even supports 8GB of RAM due to the mix of 32/64bit architecture they're using at the moment? I have seen successful reports from the Macforum.com forum using 8GB in iMacs and MB/MBPs!
 
bakedbeans said:
Yeah, apparently Apple is not very clear if the more recent hardware even supports 8GB of RAM due to the mix of 32/64bit architecture they're using at the moment? I have seen successful reports from the Macforum.com forum using 8GB in iMacs and MB/MBPs!
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The previous generation MBP will take 8Gb but Apple never revise their maximum RAM. So it is still listed as 4Gb. Because it is listed as 4Gb they will not make the modifications to Leopard and it is unstable if you put more than 6Gb in it. Snow Leopard works with the hardware maximum of each machine.

It is not actually down to a "mix of 32/64 bit" it is down to what the Intel chip set will address and as such nothing to do with Apple. IF the chipset addresses 8Gb the computer will Leopard will work with 32Gb+ The gen one Mac pro was also listed as 16Gb Max but you can stick 32Gb in it with no problems whatsoever.

So basically IF the chipset supports 8Gb the computer will if not it wont. BUT some machines will be unstable with more than 6Gb in them because Apple have not changed some code within Leopard. This will relate to machines of ABOUT 20 months old to the intro of the unibody macbook and any imacs in that same time frame.
 
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