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RAM Questions.

O

orangejuice

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 6, 2008
18
0
Hi guys,

For my sins I have always been a BTO buyer, recently making the transition to Apple from years of Dell Precision use. Sadly, gone are the days where I could customise my windows box and charge it to my employers tab! :( Basically... I need to understand how best to upgrade my new Mac Pro as before I could just select all the components with the highest numbers, bung them in and hope for the best.

Basically, I work in Audio, and certain applications are very RAM intensive, and I am looking to upgrade from my stock 2 GIG.

I have tried reading the guides, and they make 'some' sense, which is quite surprising as admittedly, I am not the most knowledgeable when it comes to computing.

I am thinking of purchasing the 8 GIG kit, thus making 10 GIG available, but after browsing threads, unless I have misunderstood... I believe this hinders performance?

Would it be best if I bought:
2 x 1 GIG so I have two matched pairs making 4 GIG in total and put them in Riser 2, and then another 4 x 2 GIG to make 8 GIG and put them in Riser 1?
Making 12 GIG Total?

Or would the 10 GIG suffice as the performance drop is negligable?

Could someone clear this up for me, do the DIMMS have to be matched across both risers for optimal performance? I.E. Use 1 GIG sticks only, or 2 GIG sticks only? Or can I use different size RAM sticks in different risers, I.E 1 GIG sticks in riser 2 and 2 GIG sticks in riser 1?

How do I optimise performance?

PPS. If there are any grammarpolice about, I apologise for my bad English, it is not my native tongue!

Thanks
 
If I were adding an extra 8 Gb of ram I would buy 4 x 2 Gb sticks.

Put 2 sticks in Riser A slots 1 & 2 and move the 2 x 1 Gb sticks to slots 3 & 4 then put the two remaining 2 Gb sticks in slots 1 & 2 of riser B
 
i think the experts say that there is "some" theoretical performance hit not having all matched dimm's, but it's negligible.

but i have to ask, what's your main app? if it's not 64 bit, it's not going to be able to access more than 4 gigs anyway, so once you get up past 6 or so (4 for your main app, and another couple for the OS etc.), it's just kind of a waste of money.

you're not running pro-tools are you? just an FYI, but if you are, you're gonna wanna wait until the have leopard support.
 
Father Jack said:
If I were adding an extra 8 Gb of ram I would buy 4 x 2 Gb sticks.

Put 2 sticks in Riser A slots 1 & 2 and move the 2 x 1 Gb sticks to slots 3 & 4 then put the two remaining 2 Gb sticks in slots 1 & 2 of riser B
Click to expand...

Based on the new MP's user manual, I'm with Father Jack.
 
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