Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

If your Mac Pro has more than 80 gigs of ram DO NOT UPDATE TO 10.8.2

HyperX13

HyperX13

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 3, 2009
351
7
Your Mac pro will not boot if you have more than 80 Gigs of Ram. I had to go back down to 64 gigs of ram on my 2012 Dual Processor 3.06 Mac Pro.

You will be stuck at PCI configuration.

10.8.2 doesn't work, but 10.8.1 does.

Seems to affect all the mac pros that can take more than 64 gigs of Ram.
 
Last edited:
I'm just curious if this will work since you said it stops at PCI configuration. Can you try adding "npci=0x2000" to Kernel Flags in your com.apple.boot.plist and see if it will boot with all the RAM after this is added?

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>npci=0x2000</string>
 
Considering Apple only supports up to 64 GB in those systems, I'm not sure how likely it is you'll ever see that "fixed".

Memory

Dual-processor systems
  • 2.4GHz, 2.66GHz, and 3.06GHz systems: 1333MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM
  • Eight memory slots (four per processor) supporting up to 64GB of main memory using 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB DIMMs
Click to expand...
 
voyagerd said:
I'm just curious if this will work since you said it stops at PCI configuration. Can you try adding "npci=0x2000" to Kernel Flags in your com.apple.boot.plist and see if it will boot with all the RAM after this is added?

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>npci=0x2000</string>
Click to expand...

I could not get into my system at all so I just removed memory. I guess I can fiddle with it now. Issue is that this already caused me a few hours of headaches and I am a bit behind on some of the crunching that I was doing.

----------
Darth.Titan said:
Considering Apple only supports up to 64 GB in those systems, I'm not sure how likely it is you'll ever see that "fixed".
Click to expand...

I agree. Apple does! OWC told me different story and it worked all the way until 10.8.2
 
In addition to me as well wondering what in the world you use 96GB of ram, or even 64GB, for, you're also contradicting yourself. In both the thread title and body you said if it has more than 96GB ram. That made me wonder why you said you had to go back down to 64GB; why not 96GB? Then at the last sentence you changed it to more than 64GB. :confused:
 
Last edited by a moderator:
iParis said:
In addition to me as well wondering what in the world you use 96GB of ram, or even 64GB, for, you're also contradicting yourself. In both the thread title and body you said if it has more than 96GB ram. That made me wonder why you said you had to go back down to 64GB; why not 96GB? Then at the last sentence you changed it to more than 64GB. :confused:
Click to expand...

You are over thinking it. Most people got what he meant and he likely just made a mistake phrasing it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
logicpro7 said:
Please tell me what you would use 96gb of ram for? Serious question :)
Click to expand...

In my case, rendering.

I have 22Gb of ram on my current system & it is choking on a 3d model of a motel. The model by itself takes up 15Gb of physical ram & another 15Gb of virtual memory. This is before I add characters.
 
logicpro7 said:
Please tell me what you would use 96gb of ram for? Serious question :)
Click to expand...

well actually I was running 128 gigs of ram. I created a ram disk for 64 gigs and used it as a photoshop scratch disk. It makes things REALLY fast. When not using it as a scratch disk, I move my apps in there (temporarily) for lightning fast access. Rendering to that ram disk is another advantage.

----------
iParis said:
In addition to me as well wondering what in the world you use 96GB of ram, or even 64GB, for, you're also contradicting yourself. In both the thread title and body you said if it has more than 96GB ram. That made me wonder why you said you had to go back down to 64GB; why not 96GB? Then at the last sentence you changed it to more than 64GB. :confused:
Click to expand...

I bought a Mac Pro with 2 cpus. Each one is 3.06. I then bought 128 gigs of ram from OWC. I loaded it up and swaped my drives from my dual processors 2.26 Mac Pro. Loaded it up and it was awesome. 128 gigs of ram showed up. I then downloaded 10.8.2 update and installed it and the Mac Pro would not boot. I discovered that people can't run 96 gigs of ram or more. I just pulled 64 gigs and its running 64 gigs of ram while my other 64 gigs of ram is sitting here

2EC1A6B9-A083-47AB-9D44-535D051362D3-2438-000002FCA3510936.jpg


F69912B9-E3F6-4296-A9FC-2ACD88721164-2438-000002FCF32F5977.jpg



screenshot_77.jpg


I am not BSing anyone here. Just giving you all heads up that if you put in 96 gigs or more you will not be able to boot up. I think someone is running 80 gigs with no issues.
 
good to know.

another use of ram is for sound libraries - if you've ever done any work using kontakt and big libraries - you know what i'm talking about. the more ram... the better.
 
TomTomTuning said:
Thanks! Does the data on the RAM clear when you reboot?

I'm interested in using something like this as a scratch disk for Photoshop/LR.
Click to expand...

Yes, RAM is volatile. When you reboot, or if your computer crashes, you will lose everything.

Using the disk util from the terminal is easy, but make sure you type the command correctly and pay attention to the quotes (don't forget the quote at the end).

Code: 
diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisk” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1165430`

The way to figure out the RAM value is to take the size that you want in MB and multiply it by 2048. So a 1000 MB RAM drive would be 2048000
 
HyperX13 said:
I bought a Mac Pro with 2 cpus. Each one is 3.06. I then bought 128 gigs of ram from OWC. I loaded it up and swaped my drives from my dual processors 2.26 Mac Pro. Loaded it up and it was awesome. 128 gigs of ram showed up. I then downloaded 10.8.2 update and installed it and the Mac Pro would not boot. I discovered that people can't run 96 gigs of ram or more. I just pulled 64 gigs and its running 64 gigs of ram while my other 64 gigs of ram is sitting here
Click to expand...

In this case your're running only in Dual Channel instead of Triple Channel.

I've ordered six 8 GB sticks - so I'll be having 48 GB RAM DDR3 1333 MHz in Triple Channel and this seems to be the best solution ;)
 
Ram disk makes sense for fast rendering speeds and graphic design work. I've personally have no reason to do... but before i got an SSD i considered making a small one.

Very interesting information OP.
 
One response in the Apple forums seems to point to the ATI driver not being able to handle more than 80GBs of RAM. That is why the screen didn't show a picture but the Mac was still available via SSH according to some people on the discussion thread where it was reported. I don't know if it was your case HyperX.

As said here:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/19781514?tstart=0#19781514?tstart=0

Per your pictures, you have an AMD card.
Conjecture: If that is true, maybe switching to an NVidia card will solve this right away?
 
And I feel like a boss running 32gb ram on my main desktop. :cool:

----------
tomvos said:
In-Memory-Databases — if speed matters, this is the way to go. :cool:
Click to expand...

In all seriousness, not necessarily. Certain db engines (caugh MySQL) only allow hash type indexes on memory tabl storage (last time I checked). Making them unsuitable for a lot of tasks, often an SSD would be better.

Edit: I just checked, MySQL can now create memory tables with either hash indexes or normal (b-tree) indexes. Still there are times where in memory tables are not the best idea...
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back