2009 Mini Upgrade With Mismatched Memory

kred321 said:

Long story short, I recently acquired a free 1 4GB memory stick from a friend through some returns confusion.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231294

I have the 2009 Mac Mini upgraded to Snow Leopard and the original 2 1GB memory sticks from Apple. Should I go with 4 GB or 5 GB keeping a 1GB stick in? My quick investigation suggested if the voltage, timing and latencies were the same, it'd be fine otherwise I should bother. However, I was unable to find this info for my original RAM.

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go with 5gb the 2009 mini is not picky most likely it will work.

kred321 said:

I have the 2009 Mac Mini upgraded to Snow Leopard and the original 2 1GB memory sticks from Apple. Should I go with 4 GB or 5 GB keeping a 1GB stick in? My quick investigation suggested if the voltage, timing and latencies were the same, it'd be fine otherwise I should bother. However, I was unable to find this info for my original RAM.

Click to expand...

If you are going through the hassle of dismantling a 2009 Mini to upgrade the memory, you might as well spend $20 for another 4Gb stick and have 8Gb.

dcoulson said:

if you are going through the hassle of dismantling a 2009 mini to upgrade the memory, you might as well spend $20 for another 4gb stick and have 8gb.

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+1

dcoulson said:

If you are going through the hassle of dismantling a 2009 Mini to upgrade the memory, you might as well spend $20 for another 4Gb stick and have 8Gb.

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Except the 2009 Mac mini only recognizes 4GB

davidmartindale said:

Except the 2009 Mac mini only recognizes 4GB

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the 2009 mac mini does 8gb ram with the proper apple efi download

You need this update: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL888

It should have been downloaded via Software Update back in 2009 and installed.

You can confirm whether you have this update already installed or not by following the instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237

Note: Only early 2009 Minis such as yours need this update. Late 2009 Minis come with the newer EFI pre-installed.

Several Macs can take more RAM than what Apple officially states, usually about double.

The 2011 iMac, Mac Mini and MacBook Pro can all take double the official maximum. All 2011 iMacs can take 4x8GB RAM, all 2011 Mac Mini's and 2011 MBPs can take 2x8GB RAM.

dcoulson said:

If you are going through the hassle of dismantling a 2009 Mini to upgrade the memory, you might as well spend $20 for another 4Gb stick and have 8Gb.

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Agreed as well. While you will probably notice an improvement in speeds by having more memory (2GB is borderline at best anymore)... You will still be losing up to 5-10% of your max by not having a paired set of memory. Your computer won't be able to take advantage of the dual channel memory since they will be different sizes. Will you notice? Probably not, but it is just worth noting is all.