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Best Ram for Retina iMac?
- Thread starter intz2nu
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I've bought a LOT of stuff from these guys, including memory, for years, and they're excellent:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/iMac/Retina-5K/DDR3L
I bought an additional 16GB with my iMac 27" Retina from Adorama! They shipped is very quickly and gave me great service.
After I found out that the iMac Retina runs with 1866 MHz RAM I bought a 16 Gig set of Kingston Hyper-X 1866 Dimms (hx318ls10ibk2/16) and it runs like hell! The best CPU is only as fast as it can get data from the memory. This is a real improvement and these Dimms are not more expensive than the 1600.
You have to take out all 1600 Dimms to let the iMac switch to 1866.
You have to take out all 1600 Dimms to let the iMac switch to 1866.
Kind of a newbie here what exactly are the Dimms and is it easy to remove? I created this thread after reading up on how not all ram is the same as each other I've also read about matched sticks of ram, etc etc but I am not sure of what this all means I'm wanting the very best ram I can get and want to max out my machine at the full 32gigs of ram it will take.
If you wanted the best RAM take 4*8 GB of compatible DIMMs with the fastest speed available. In this case it means two 16 GB kits of 1866 MHz RAM, e.g. the ones mentioned from Kingston. You can open the RAM Door, remove and install the new DIMMs without any tools or special knowledge. The procedure is described from Apple in great detail: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204687
Could you link me to the ram please, the exact ones you speak of? This is a great bit of help.
Small clock differences may not make any difference at all, and of course if you're leaving the old ram in, they will make zero difference. My vote is actually crucial, because it's the most cost effective brand that doesn't have a lot of complaints about bad sticks. It's worth running memtest before placing your machine back in service, regardless of what brand you purchase. OWC and Kingston are not immune to shipping bad sticks.
How would I know if I got a bad stick out of the 4? also what exactly is memtest and is this difficult to run / do?
I haven't had to use it in a while, but it will turn up one or more errors. I suggest running it for several cycles. I do so overnight. It's an open source utility for testing ram. Ram can work and have occasional bit flips. These should be extremely rare, so if they turn up even one during testing, it can be considered a bad stick (test mentions it by where it's installed). These guys forked development (or took it over?) some time ago. The free version has everything you need though. Here's another fork. I haven't tried this version. I haven't used it in a while, as I haven't installed any ram upgrades in some time.
For reference look at memory reviews on newegg, amazon, etc. and you will see complaints about ram. As I mentioned none of these companies are completely immune to shipping bad sticks, so it's a good idea to test it.
I'm also a fan of OWC. They get some flack on this site, but I've had zero issues with the purchases I've made from them (8 GB of RAM, Cinema Display, power cords, etc., etc.).
There's a good reason for that. They've used extremely dishonest marketing with their ssds.
You can probably reach support with less effort than Amazon or Newegg, and you don't have to watch for which items are in fact sold directly. I just checked Crucial and it's $40 cheaper for a 16GB kit that is at least as good as anything offered by OWC. Crucial's site typically carries a slightly higher markup than the other stores I mentioned. I've avoided corsair, gskill, etc due to complaints about bad sticks on newegg and a couple on here where people didn't bother to test their memory.
Sure. Might all be true and I've never bought an SSD from them, so buyer pay attention and beware. I've just had zero issues with them.