New Mac Pro w/ Kernel Panics

[akadmon]

Another update:

The system has been up and running hard for almost 24 hours now, but I have been getting ECC errors. I am in the middle of a tech support email volley with their support team and I think I might send all 6 sticks back and try the other type of ram they sell for the MP. Both have a giant heatsink, but I have heard better reports from users of the other type.

I'll keep posting in the hopes it will help others.

I got Techworks sticks from OWC and they've been working great so far (no KPs, no ECC errors). The Techworks sticks are actually a teeny bit less expensive than OWC sticks, and they come with the exact same heat sinks as the Apple OEM RAM. Based on numerous complaints about OWC RAM, I would strongly recommend staying away from it. OWC is a nice company to work with, so getting a more reliable Techworks RAM under OWC generous return policy is the best way to go.

 

[tuartboy]

Ok, I have been in the process of getting my ram traded out for a while now and I am actually starting to get frustrated with OWC. We keep firing emails back and forth and I just end up talking to a different person every time. I'm going to give them a call in the morning if I don't hear back.

This seems excessive to me:

 

[cshrumors]

the OWC ram does not have the apple qualified heatsinks because you ordered the ram from a third party

What makes you say that?

I have OWC RAM and they use *EXACTLY* the same heatsinks that Apple does and the same RAM chips.

No problems here.

He might have gotten defective RAM from them, but you can get that from Apple too.

If I were him I'd test the RAM one module at a time and then call OWC if any of them fail.

 

[tuartboy]

I hate it when people leave these threads open and I'm sorry I did. Just a follow-up on what happened:

I originally bought 4 sticks and at least 2 were bad. I RMA'd the 2 and OWC sent them out right away. There were a few errors in a few of the sticks for a while after that, but within a few weeks all 4 were running without errors. Must have needed a bit of time to burn in.

Overall, the machine has been fast and very stable, even running ramdisks for scratch drives. The ram is so cheap ($199 for 4GB) at OWC right now I might just upgrade to 9GB. I have hit the limit on my 5GB many times in the past. (I use the big tiles plugin for photoshop, so it jumps to about 1.5GB right away)