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

Lion shuts down using 16GB of Memory.

L

lariosme

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 24, 2011
3
0
I recently purchased 16GB of Corsair Memory (2x4 DDR3 1333MHz) on Amazon to prepare for Mac OS X Lion. When using Snow Leopard, my iMac had no issues addressing all 16GB. After installing Lion, my iMac is unable to operate longer than a few minutes before it shuts off. I've been doing quite an amount of research and I'm unable to find anyone w/ similar issues. Is this normal when upgrading to a new OS?

iMac
27-inch, Mid 2010
Processor: 3.2 GHz Intel Core i3
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 5670 512MB
 
You have a few problems:

1) Your mac can't support 16GB of ram:eek:
2) OSX Lion can't support that much because it was just released:eek:
3) The ram is faulty:D
 
In the past different versions of OS X have had different levels of compatibility with RAM. It's quite possible that Lion is having compatibility issues with that particular RAM. Can you get it exchanged?
 
Good chance you have bad RAM. Have seen this before, but it's certainly not OS specific. I would bet you if you installed Snow Leopard again you'd have the same issues.

You could try booting to single user mode and getting something like Rember to try testing your RAM.

You could also take your iMac to the Genius bar and ask them to run extended RAM testing on your machine overnight to check for RAM issues/shutdowns.
 
Mid June 2010 i3 and 16Gb RAM Issues

Well myself personally am having all sorts of dilemmas since upgrading to 10.7. Some issues have been resolved and others not. Been on the phone the Apple Developers having a cry lol as I've managed to locate quite a few major bugs.

Any late model iMac from mid 2010 onwards can support 16Gb RAM, mine does and worked with SL 10.6.8. It's things like Pro-Tools that are only 32bit Apps that cannot access pass 4Gb RAM even if you do have have large memory.

As for an upgrade vs clean install, there is no real difference except you may have issues with MAIL and a few other things, other wise I would stick to an Archive Install.

I tried the Clean Install to see wether my issues would go away, but unfortunately not to be.

Also as I pointed out to Apple, a possible oversight they may not have foreseen is user configurations that could cause issues. Myself personally have graphics tablets, recording gear etc hanging off the iMac, maybe that's a factor whom knows.

Also if you notice with SL 10.6.8 the system overheads to run the system was 1.08Gb and with Lion 10.7 it's 3.8Gb… Whopping difference. Now I am wondering wether the Virtual Page Swap File may be causing issues.

I Guess time will tell, just blinking annoying I've had to go back to 10.6.8 as Pro-Tools HD is not Lion Compatible
 
Thanks for all the replies everyone!

After some LONG process of elimination, my iMac has no issues running any combination of sticks of Corsair memory. It does, however, shut down if it totals 16GB of memory, something I NEVER had an issue w/ running Snow Leopard. The only possible theory is that Mac OS X Lion is unable to support 16GB of memory due to it's early stages of release. I currently took it down to 12GB for the time being.

Thanks again.
 
Ok, updated OSX to Lion with 4gb ram, no issues to report..

Then today I upgraded my ram to 8gb and have had kernal panic on start up, Freezes, when wake from sleep..

Odd thing is, Ive tested the ram in my other machine and all is fine.. In current machine I ran tests with rember and all have come out clean with no ram problems and in system report it says its ok..

So what is causing the problems?
Machine in question is Macbook pro 13 mid 2009 (which says 8gb is compatible)
 
I am experiencing the same issue. I got a mid 2010 base model 21.5 iMac. I bought 2x2gb 1333mhz Kingston ram and installed. After 1 day of usage, the iMac frozen and started to make does 3 beeps that indicate memory fault. I started testing module by module and slot by slot. A day of testing: All fine. Then, I decided to try 6GB and now its smooth. Tested 6GB with other combinations of modules and slots and all went fine.
I decided to try again with the 8GB, and it frozen again and again and again. I made several tests and was able to reproduce the problem easily with 8GB.
So it must be some kind of instability with 8gb or 16gb or using all the 4 memory slots.
There is a thread in Apple Forums with many people complaining about the exact same thing. Some of them got their logic board replaced and one guy even got a new iMac, but the problem persisted.
So they concluded that its better to use 6gb than nothing.
I am using it right now and Lion is running nice.
 
I'm also having a problem with 8gb... Coming off of Snow Leopard. My mac maxes out at 7.9x gb's of mem and then my machine freezes up.

IT's very frustrating. As I type this I'm at 5.79GB and I hardly have many apps open... 1 small file in Photoshop, Paralells, nothing else overly obvious in atmonitor.

I'm shocked at the difference in performance. I can barely work on my machine anymore!
 
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