I prefer Ramjet RAM, and I almost fell off my seat yesterday.
Yesterday morning (Thursday, Apr 12), the price of 16 GB (4 sticks of 4 GB each) was $4699, but the price dropped remarkably in the afternoon: The current price is $3995. Wow.... a decrease of $700 in one day. Amazing. At this price, I am going to jump on it.
(I trust Ramjet. Many years ago, I had a piece of Ramjet RAM that didn't work after an Apple firmware upgrade. Although I had owned the RAM stick for over a year, they replaced it immediately, free express shipping, no questions asked. I recall that they are just a small, affordable company in Illinois... very easy to work with.)
Just my two cents.......
Are you completely nuts? OWC has 16gb for $1899.
Of course you can buy 16 GB of RAM using 8 sticks (2 GB per stick) for a less-expensive price.... you are absolutely right. If you only wanted 16 GB of RAM--using all 8 slots in your Mac Pro--then your method is perfect.
So the OWC price you are quoting is for 2 GB sticks of RAM.
I'm talking in my post about 4 GB sticks of RAM, so you can fit 16 GB into just 4 slots of your Mac Pro (which leaves the other 4 slots empty). In fact, you could buy 8 sticks of 4 GB RAM, for a total of 32 GB of RAM.
I hope you see the difference here: I'm talking about the price of 4 GB sticks of RAM, which is obviously a more-expensive BUT more-compact way of instaling 16 GB of RAM. My method leaves 4 available slots and allows you to install 32 GB of RAM.
(I don't think I'm crazy..... I hope that makes sense.)
the mac pro will not take more than 16gb of memory. but i cannot confirm whether if it will take 4gb memory modules or not.
It's weird... on the ramjet website they claim the Mac Pro's maximum Ram allocation is 32GB. Yet all of Apple's own specs mention just 16GB. Has anyone managed to test 32GB inside a Mac Pro to see if it truly works??
Actually, Apple always states their "Tech Specs" according to the maximum RAM configuration that they sell (in this case, 16 GB)...... HOWEVER, We have reasons to believe that 32 GB should actually be possible, and that's why I plan to buy 8 sticks of 4 GB each. I do NOT intend to leave any slots empty.
I am still waiting for confirmation from a colleague on the Apple campus to confirm that 32 GB can be addressed and used from a Mac Pro. I do NOT have a confirmation yet, but we have reasons to believe it should work. For instance, 32 GB can be used and addressed by the Xserve.
Okay... wanting to know whether or not the Mac Pro's could support more than 16GB of Ram, I decided to e-mail Ramjet.com. This is their reply:
"Lone Deranger,
The memory controller is the Mac Pro is actually able to address far more than 32GB, but the limitation is the size of the FB-DIMMs that are able to be made. The 4Gig FB-DIMM is a brand new product, and it the kit works perfectly in all models of the Mac Pro, including that new 8-core model that we just received last Friday. Here is a screenshot showing the full 32Gigs running"
WOW... how cool is that! 😱