Hey guys, I'm a Mac newbie and I recently just purchased an iMac MC812LL/A 21.5-Inch from around Mid 2011. Love the i5 Quad-core but it only comes with 4GB RAM. I've read I can have as much as 16GB which would be great. I also heard that Apple charges you out the ass to upgrade so I was wondering where the best place to buy the new RAM would be and where I can get it installed (or I guess I can just figure it out for myself to install it). Thanks.
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Best place to purchase/install more RAM?
- Thread starter delvec19
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I have had good experiences with the Crucial Memory Advisor. They put it right on the home page so you don't have to dig for it. OWC is another good site that has dealt favorably with me and many here like.
We use OWC (www.macsales.com) exclusively at work for our Mac workstations and they're a pleasure to work with. Quality products matched for your Macs and really good customer support.
You have been provided 2 reputable providers (Crucial & OWC), of the two OWC tends to cost more however they specialize in Macs and offer many more services than Crucial does. If cost is your only consideration then Crucial is the way to go, if you feel you need more service then OWC would be the logical choice.
OWC tests their components thoroughly and they stand by their products and warranties. So far all the RAM we've ordered from them have worked great for all our Macs and we've had no failures. If you know your model it's easy to find the proper RAM.
We also use them for external hard drives. Recently we bought a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 enclosure with 8TB storage from them. They shipped it with the drives individually packaged, but mounted in the brackets and numbered. The drives had all been rigorously tested and guaranteed to work. That's the kind of service they provide.
It might be overkill for you and you do pay a bit more for their matched RAM.
For my own computers I've used Crucial several times and never had a problem with their RAM either so you'll be fine either way.