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iMac with more than 4 GB of RAM

A

ajbrehm

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 14, 2002
341
0
Zurich, Switzerland
Can a (currently available) iMac use more than 4 GB of memory? I am wondering if the limit is enforced by hardware or if more memory is merely not officially supported but might work.

Also, what do the rumours and expectations say about the next series of iMacs?

Frankly, if it were possible to put more than 4 GB of RAM in an iMac I would buy a new one immediately. I currently have a 2007 iMac Core 2 Duo 1.16 with 3 GB and a 2004 iMac G5 1.6 with 1 GB. I find the Mac Pro too expensive, especially considering that the standard configuration only comes with 2 GB of memory.

I looked into Sun (Intel-based) workstations as an alternative to run Windows VMs.
 
iShater said:
What were you going to run on the Sun boxes? and you are running Windows VMs. Or is this not a really major part of your work-flow?
Click to expand...

The Sun box would run Solaris and xVM (Xen).

The Windows VMs are for work (Visual Studio, MSSQL) and .NET/Mono development. But I wouldn't want Windows to run on the metal. I only need it for certain applications.

I have nothing against Windows per se and like the Windows server system, .NET, and Visual Studio. But for everyday use I prefer Mac OS and for a computer running VMs I would prefer Solaris as the metal OS as I found it to be very stable and robust, more so than Windows or Mac OS.
 
notquiteanewbie said:
Doesn't the memory controller support 8GB? I'm really hoping someone can test this but the cheapest configuration of 2x4GB DDR2 800 is like $700 right now.
Click to expand...

Spending that type of money for a system like an iMac seems a bit ridiculous IMO. Is there anything that you have where 6GB will work better then 4GB? If there is then go for it, but if not I would stick with 4GB and put that 700 dollars towards a new computer in the future which can better use that memory.
 
Spending that type of money for a system like an iMac seems a bit ridiculous IMO. Is there anything that you have where 6GB will work better then 4GB? If there is then go for it, but if not I would stick with 4GB and put that 700 dollars towards a new computer in the future which can better use that memory.
Click to expand...

I agree, $700 is ridiculous, though that price will come down over time. A solid state drive would offer better performance but of course the prices for a 3.5" SSD are also pretty sky high and the capacity is lower.

Lets also not forget this is an iMac, certainly isn't the most upgradeable system around.

So to recap,

ssd hard disk - price is too high for most, at this time

2x4gb ddr2 800 - price is too high for most, at this time

processor upgrade - perhaps, certainly possible, depending on your current system, I'm not sure if you would see a huge benefit. I don't think I would with my 2.6 core 2 duo

Snow Leopard - If what I'm reading is true, you should see some performance gains
 
If you get 6GB of RAM to actually work in an iMac, let us know. I've seen this discussed on other threads, yet no one seems to actually have done it.
 
ajbrehm said:
Can a (currently available) iMac use more than 4 GB of memory? I am wondering if the limit is enforced by hardware or if more memory is merely not officially supported but might work.
Click to expand...
I have an iMac with 4 GB of RAM and am considering upgrading to 6 or 8 GB of RAM so I can better run VMs in OS X. However, I run into performance problems because the memory I have is not being efficiently managed. On average, 2.5-3.0 GB of my RAM is in use by loaded applications, yet OS X eventually pages some of it out without any apparent reason, thus decimating multitasking performance.

I tried disabling swap; with about 3GB of memory actually being used by running processes, the system eventually stops allocating memory. It turns out that OS X has no out-of-memory handler like Linux or Windows and will eventually just stop responding.

I suspect that my workload would not have the same performance issues if I ran Windows 2008 or Linux on the same hardware.

ajbrehm said:
The Sun box would run Solaris and xVM (Xen).

The Windows VMs are for work (Visual Studio, MSSQL) and .NET/Mono development. But I wouldn't want Windows to run on the metal. I only need it for certain applications.

I have nothing against Windows per se and like the Windows server system, .NET, and Visual Studio. But for everyday use I prefer Mac OS and for a computer running VMs I would prefer Solaris as the metal OS as I found it to be very stable and robust, more so than Windows or Mac OS.
Click to expand...
What's so special about Sun hardware? Would you use xVM VirtualBox (where there VM runs as a process on the host like VMware Workstation - not like Xen) or xVM Server (Xen based, but apparently not yet released and optimized for server use, not desktop use)?
If you're going to access the VMs over the network, why not use one of the free hypervisor-based VM systems (Hyper-V, ESXi, or XenServer)? All of them will work on cheap desktop hardware if you buy the right stuff and have excellent performance.
 
jf8 said:
What's so special about Sun hardware?
Click to expand...

Sun make excellent hardware and, like Apple, sell hardware combined with their own operating system. I like getting everything needed to run the thing from one party.

jf8 said:
Would you use xVM VirtualBox (where there VM runs as a process on the host like VMware Workstation - not like Xen) or xVM Server (Xen based, but apparently not yet released and optimized for server use, not desktop use)?
Click to expand...

I guess I would use xVM/Xen, given that I would likely access the Windows VMs via RDC anyway.


jf8 said:
If you're going to access the VMs over the network, why not use one of the free hypervisor-based VM systems (Hyper-V, ESXi, or XenServer)? All of them will work on cheap desktop hardware if you buy the right stuff and have excellent performance.
Click to expand...

Cheap desktop hardware is the sort of thing I am trying to avoid. Turns out more expensive hardware is not much more expensive anyway and it's one of the reasons I am a Mac user.

So I would buy Sun hardware anyway.

Why not Hyper-V or other Xen-based systems? Because if I have the Sun hardware I can also run their version of Xen and with Solaris I am also getting an excellent server OS.
 
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