Can I put 32GB ram on my iMac when max is 16GB?

[kschendel]

Only buy memory from Mac Specialists. Crucial and OWC for mine.

There's nothing apple specific about the memory as far as I know, but there's a fair amount of junk out there, and the larger sticks seem to be fussier about meeting spec and matching among sticks. I'd amend the statement to "only buy from quality vendors who know memory and know exactly what specs are required". I've mentioned Data Memory Systems in my posts, they are just one example, there are others. Crucial is fine. OWC is fine but they tend to charge a premium.

 

[kiwipeso1]

Only buy memory from Mac Specialists. Crucial and OWC for mine.

Ram doesn't care who makes it, so long as it is the right speed and size, and not zapped by static while installing it.
It takes about 10 minutes to unbox an iMac, put it on a table screen down with newspaper underneath, then arrange the ram and carefully put it upright and turn it on.
I used to do it a few times a day when I was working at a third party Apple dealer, as we usually doubled the ram for free with either Kingston or Crucial, or Toshiba ram.
We would usually recycle the Apple ram to the next ram upgrade, except for the weird dude who watched me work on it as if I would work faster on the spot, who then asked that his Apple ram not be recycled, so I tripled it and said if it doesn't work, it would have to be only doubled for free. It worked with 12GB fine, but we stopped customers from standing watch over upgrades after that.

Long and slightly relevant story aside, you can use ram in pairs in iMacs, so it can be 4(2x2), 8(2x4), 12(2x2 + 2x4), 16(4x4 or 2x8), 20 (2x2 + 2x8), 24 (2x4 + 2x8), 32 (4x8).

 

[26139]

The slow down you're experiencing is probably due to the hard drive in there. If you upgrade to an SSD, that's when you will see an improvement by orders of magnitude.

Yuuuuuuuuppppp.

 

[Chefdrcummins]

I have a 21.5 inch iMac, mid 2011 model. It has been running slow so I decided to buy some extra memory from crucial.com. On their website it says that you can install 32gb of ram on my model and so I went ahead and bought it and have just installed it.

Only after installing it did I have the idea of seeing what it says on the Apple website (yes, backwards thinking, I know) and on the Apple website it says the max for my model is 16gb.

The question is, now I have 32gb, as advised by Crucial, should I just leave 32gb in my machine, or could it damage my Mac?

I appreciate I can call Crucial and they'll sort it out, but I'm interested to know what the implications are of over-speccing the computer.

Thanks!

Can someone explain this screen to me? I have mid2011 27” iMac. I attempted to upgrade from the 2x2G to the 4x8G. the computer wouldn’t get off the loading picture. I tried to return to the original configuration and same screen. 🤦‍♂️