Last week I had a 4 gig memory module fail on my Mac Pro, dropping me from 24 gigabytes to only 16 gigabytes of memory – the additional lost 4 gigs being due to memory being in pairs on Mac Pro systems – the loss of one 4 gig module meant I lost access to a matching and working 4 gig module along with the failed one.
That same day a friend of mine, Tim, told me he’d send me memory from one of his old systems – 32 gigabytes total in 8 sticks of 4 gigs each, FB-DDR2. Sure, it’s only 667 mhz, but that’s what I was running at with my old memory configuration. I’d rather have the capacity than the speed, anyway.
The one thing is, this memory isn’t technically for this kind of machine. Apple recommends Memory that uses larger than normal heat sinks which certainly do aid in cooling. That being said, these Samsung modules that I was sent are known to work fine in Mac Pro systems, although they do get quite hot. That’s normal for Fully Buffered memory, since it has that particular special hardware on it that makes it what it is, and that processing unit gets hot. It seems in the long term this should be fine, as others have used these more normal FB-DIMM’s in their Mac Pro systems without issue.
I won’t say much else about the modules yet – they just got in today from Florida and I’ve yet to really “bake them in” so to speak. What I can say for certain is this – on such a system, with how I use it, 32 gigabytes is a massive amount of memory, giving me enough overhead for most any project I would use the machine to work on.
Yet still, my main system is a rather modest Windows box. Go figure.
More to come, as always.
