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Apple Officially Adds Support for Up to 16 GB of RAM on Quad-Core Mac Pro
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I always keep the original RAM around. If I have a problem that requires service, I always put the original memory back so that's not the first thing they'll point to. YMMV.
Those prices at Apple are good as it can get! I rather buy the Mac Pro with 32GB DDR3 ECC, Apple Mac Pro Raid with 512MB Cache, ATI Radeon 4870 with 512MB DDR5, Airport Extreme 802.11n that's it. Then go buy four Western Digital Black 2TB 7200RPM with 64MB Cache for $300 each. Apple Care can cover everything else. I feel its common sense if the Mac Pro is your chief money maker for Animation, Photography, Audio and or Video Production then why you put something in it that doesn't have a warranty coverage. Meaning Apple Store is up the road from me. Third party you will have to wait after you ship it. In any production time is money, so far from my experience I don't trust Kingston Memory that what cause my 2007 Mac mini to go down last year. Seagate I heard too many horror stories to even rely on them. I pretty much trust Western Digital their 2TB External Hard Drives have work well for me, so I'm looking to get the 4TB external maybe later this year. Yeah there's a lot more TV Shows in HD I'm getting.
If you are willing to buy the part most likely to fail (hard drive) from a 3rd party why not memory? 32GB of memory can be found for $1,259 at OWC. Paying $2,450 (previously $4,850) for inclusive warranty on memory seems a little excessive no? Maybe the peace of mind is worth it to you.
Actually Samsung has! Yeah I'm also looking into seeing the results of a 16GB DDR3 SODIMM Kit in a MacBook Pro 17" 3.06GHz Core Duo 2 with a Western Digital 1TB 2.5" 5200RPM 8MB Cache!
It's a long way from Samsung announcing a module to kits for sale. Expect to see these available in about 6 months or so. Expect to see Apple computers that can actually use them sometime after that.
OWC even offers a buy back on the existing RAM (it was only $25 for the 2GB that came with the machine)
Glad that they are taking time to make little adjustments with their existing product line. That RAM on the site is still insane.
The 4 GB sticks of registered ECC memory are very expensive, no matter the manufacturer. We have an HP Itanium2 server at work (running HP-UX 11.31) that runs our Oracle database. We just last week purchased an additional 128 GB of ram to upgrade it (for a total of 256 GB now). The price from HP for the 128 GB upgrade? $133,000. Yes, that's about $1k per gig.
If we had gone with the 2 GB sticks instead of the 4 GB sticks, the price would be HALF that.
If we had gone with the 2 GB sticks instead of the 4 GB sticks, the price would be HALF that.
HP must be playing games like Toyota/Lexus parts. I just priced out a Proliant DL 360 G6 with 144GB of RAM two weeks ago and it came out to less than $40,000 including 5 years of 24x7 4 hour response support
A Proliant 360 is pretty far from an Integrity rx8640.
Price on our rx8640 server as configured was north of $200k. But then again, big-iron UNIX is never cheap, no matter who the vendor is.
Ha,
just for fun I took your apple store link http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MB535LL/A?mco=Nzk2MDk0Mw and added the most hardware I could, just to see how much $$$'s:
Last time I paid near that much was back in 1989 $7k for the original Mac Portable, which in today's dollars is about $12k.
per http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
If you added on the other six supported displays with this configuration (not on the BTO page), you would need four MDP to DL DVI adaptors, +$396, and the other displays themselves equalling $27,737.
No. 4GB is installed in two of the three memory channels. 2x 4GB is installed in one of the memory channels.
The first 12GB will be running at triple channel speed.
The next 4GB will be running at single channel speed. This is hundreds of times faster than a 12GB machine which accesses the next 4GB through paging to disk.
Or as Apple phrases it: Populating slot 4 slightly drops maximum memory bandwidth, but depending on the applications used, overall system performance may benefit from the larger amount of memory.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Mac_Pro_Early2009_Memory_DIMM_DIY.pdf
Haha not bad considering (old) company paid 450k CAD for an Octane then another 275k for O2
Then it was the first SGI Windows box (name escapes me) for 32k.The most Ive ever paid (present company) for a Mac was close to 19k but that was thanks to loading up off 16GB RAM (MP 2008)
These days we wont go higher than 10k for a Mac. We figured were wasting our money on RAM since no app (were using) is 64bit yet 
4GB sticks are very expensive from anywhere, we have to buy them for servers and these are the same prices as other OEMs. Even from Crucial it is over $1,500. Let's be fair.
Fun and all, but what's the point?
16GB - 32GB sounds pretty cool and all. But Nor Logic Pro as Adobe software are 64-bit. Which means that for a lot of pro's these amounts are still pretty useless. Common software developers we're running 64-bit systems for years!
16GB - 32GB sounds pretty cool and all. But Nor Logic Pro as Adobe software are 64-bit. Which means that for a lot of pro's these amounts are still pretty useless. Common software developers we're running 64-bit systems for years!
Ok, the big question...
What are you gonna do with 16GB of ram?
I have 10GB in mine and I work with 3D animations and the computer just uses 4GB at the most, there is no way to make the 3D applications to use more than that.
And in the case I have several applications that could use the ram open at same time... they use thye ram when rendering and the processors as well so if the processors are bussy what is the sense in having so much ram if I can not use it?
With 6GB of ram you are way safe for even the most complex application ever.
Tell me, for what are you gonna use that much ram?
Lightwave, 3D studio, Cinema 4D, After Effects... I have ahd all those applications open at same time and I can only use 1 rendering. If I am not rendering I can have all of them open with 2.5GB of ram any way.
Speed? Macs does not work that way neither with more ram.
What are you gonna do with 16GB of ram?
I have 10GB in mine and I work with 3D animations and the computer just uses 4GB at the most, there is no way to make the 3D applications to use more than that.
And in the case I have several applications that could use the ram open at same time... they use thye ram when rendering and the processors as well so if the processors are bussy what is the sense in having so much ram if I can not use it?
With 6GB of ram you are way safe for even the most complex application ever.
Tell me, for what are you gonna use that much ram?
Lightwave, 3D studio, Cinema 4D, After Effects... I have ahd all those applications open at same time and I can only use 1 rendering. If I am not rendering I can have all of them open with 2.5GB of ram any way.
Speed? Macs does not work that way neither with more ram.
It is designed to upsell folks into the the more expensive dual processor package model. Plus it is just temporary. For the folks that buy now with 6 GB if just wait 2-3 years to upgrade up to 16 GB, the prices will be much more reasonable.
However, you also can also get slightly more parallelism out of the dual processor package model since go from 3 to 6 memory channels. So for 12 GB main memory for both:
single package / 3 x 4GB [ $3,849 2.66 GHz dual package ]
versus
dual package / 6 x 2 GB [ $3,599 2.26 GHz dual package ]
[ Yes. Know on prices a bit of Apples to Oranges because slight clock differences. However, if have fixed budget, sub $4K, will have to make trade-offs. Could even go to 16GB on dual package 2.26 model and still be below the single package with those 4GB DIMMs ; $3,799. ]
If you have 6 different threads/cores all pulling out of different 2 GB regions they can all stream memory in parallel without stepping on each other with the 6 memory channel box. Even if you get 6 threads running concurrently on the single package out of the same 2 GB sized regions, some of those threads will share a memory channel(s).
There is a bit of a trade-off in assigning more DIMMs to each channel.
However, yes Apple would have harder time selling the 2.26 dual package boxes if most folks could "load up" the single processor package boxes with greater than 8GB in a more affordable fashion.
All that said, the single processor package box is definitely priced to make Apple very comfortable margins.
Actively, run more than one app that consumes lots of memory.
Correct, in that is not what most folks do with these ( may have multiple apps open but they are not grinding on multi-GB data sets concurrently. )
It is going to be tough for a single application to choke down tons of memory. (barring complicated simulations; finite element model off current patterns in a whole ocean, detailed airflow over a airframe. etc. )
Usually, if have just have one user sitting in front of the machine, that means having one program that is essentially a non-interactive batch job ( e.g, some scripted photo transfer and pre-processing ) and another app that requires lots of memory with interaction.
It is more trivial to do with a multi-user database. However, that primarily because have multiple users banging on the same box.
However, in many of these situations would likely need (or could leverage) more cores too.