Yet Another RAM Question

[MrT-Man]

I'm about to buy a Mac Pro (first Mac since my PowerBook 520, circa 1994!). I've read a few of the threads on RAM and there still a couple of things I'm not clear on.

To start off with, I won't be doing anything too processor-intensive... i.e. no Final Cut Pro, not even much Photoshop... Logic Pro is pretty much the biggest app I'll use. So I'm going for a quad-core, and I figure that 4GB - 6GB of RAM should be fine, & I can always get more RAM later on.

I've read about how important it is to match the RAM and fill your banks, so my questions are:

- If I just get a 1GB x 2 set from OWC or whomever, to get 4GB total, does that work just fine alongside the 1GB x 2 OEM RAM that's already in there? Or do you actually need to make sure that the four sticks in a bank are 100% exactly identical in every way/shape/form?

- Let's say I go for 6GB, which would mean buying 1GB x 4 and installing that alongside the existing 1GB x 2. I know I won't get the performance that I would have if all the slots were full, but the 6GB won't actually give me WORSE performance, for whatever strange bizarre reason, than 1GB x 4, would it?

Thanks!

 

[junior77]

- If I just get a 1GB x 2 set from OWC or whomever, to get 4GB total, does that work just fine alongside the 1GB x 2 OEM RAM that's already in there? Or do you actually need to make sure that the four sticks in a bank are 100% exactly identical in every way/shape/form?!

No, they do not have to be 'identical', just conform to the same specification. OWC/TransIntl...shouldn't have any issue with RAM.

- Let's say I go for 6GB, which would mean buying 1GB x 4 and installing that alongside the existing 1GB x 2. I know I won't get the performance that I would have if all the slots were full, but the 6GB won't actually give me WORSE performance, for whatever strange bizarre reason, than 1GB x 4, would it?

There isn't a penalty in having the additional 2GB, but you would see an improvement if you have 8x1GB over the 6x1GB, from simply more physical RAM and from speed processing increase. Whether or not you will actually utlize or notice the speed increase in real world applications is a whole new debate. Based on what applications your running, it maybe completely trivial.