That's a tuff call...as I look on the pair of 8GB Crucial on my desk (IT'S BEST INSTALLED IN PAIRS), I am saying why not go for 16GB? It can never hurt doing that as well as it would maintain a reasonable market value when selling.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
OWC vs Crucial Memory
- Thread starter Lugwump
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
That's a tuff call...as I look on the pair of 8GB Crucial on my desk (IT'S BEST INSTALLED IN PAIRS), I am saying why not go for 16GB? It can never hurt doing that as well as it would maintain a reasonable market value when selling.
The only problematic memory I ever bought was from OWC, never bought from Crucial.
I'd recommend an entirely different vendor:
http://www.datamemorysystems.com/ap...6ghz-md388ll/a-cto-late-2012-memory-upgrades/
Never a problem with anything I bought from them....
I'd recommend an entirely different vendor:
http://www.datamemorysystems.com/ap...6ghz-md388ll/a-cto-late-2012-memory-upgrades/
Never a problem with anything I bought from them....
I forgot the associated question: if I go with the single 8 GB stick, is there an advantage to putting in one slot versus the other? Again, TIA.
If this is a silly question I'll apologize in advance: Is there any manufacturer that provides 16GB sticks for a total of 32GB? If I'm going to move to a mini I'll need more than 16 GB for VMs.
Support tops out at 16GB in my searches. I'm wondering if this is a design issue or lack of parts.
Support tops out at 16GB in my searches. I'm wondering if this is a design issue or lack of parts.
Lack of parts, IMHO. IM has some 16 GB modules:
http://www.intelligentmemory.com/dram-modules/?tab=02&_DDR3_SO-DIMM
You can expect a price in the range of 1500-2000 US$. Available probably in Q3 or Q4 2013.
Hi!
I work for a distributor of I'M Intelligent Memory and I can assure you the end-customer price will be below $300 and the products will be in mass production mid/late february this year, which is in about 4-6 weeks! I know it is not 'cheap', but at least it's not $1500 nor $2000 and some people will pay the price to get to the maximum amount of memory in their system.
But the Memory Reference Code (MRC) in the BIOS of almost all Intel based platforms (including Apple) currently limits the maximum capacity per module to 8 Gigabyte. This is not a hardware issue! Any system that can take 8GB UDIMMs or SO-DIMMs technically also can take 16GB modules, as long as the MRC/BIOS code understands how to program the memory controller inside the CPU for this capacity.
Unbuffered 16 Gigabyte DIMM and SO-DIMM modules need to be made with DRAM-ICs having 8 Gigabit per chip. Such 8 Gigabit DDR3 ICs are part of the DDR3 JEDEC specification JESD79-3E. The processor-manufacturers usually take the JEDEC specifications to design their memory interface for it, but for some reason Intel only supports max 4 Gigabit per chip, resulting in max 8 Gigabyte per module.
My personal feeling is that at the time when Intel wrote the BIOS and the MRC routines, they maybe thought there would never be any DDR3 components with more than 4 Gigabit. Or maybe JEDEC added the 8 Gigabit a little later, I just see that it is part of the spec since year 2010.
With other platforms, we have not seen any such limitations. On any AMD based motherboard we tried, the modules worked right away. Cavium Octeon boards also take them. Freescale shows 8 Gigabit supported in their CPU documentations.
It wouldn't be much work to add the support for 8 Gigabit DDR3 DRAMs to the MRC / BIOS, but we need to wait and see if Intel or Apple take care and do it as it can hardly be done by the users themselves.
Maybe it just requires the right person within Intels or Apples management to instruct the engineers to do it, but maybe they will just say they do not want to invest any time into it.
Just one success so far: Intel released a BIOS update for their Atom C2000 series processors, codename 'Avoton', to support the 16GB modules. But this won't help the Apple community.
Maybe Apple just does not know about the 16GB modules, yet, maybe they would take care quickly. But we need to create some awareness that such modules exist and that customers would like to have them. Any support from the Apple users is highly appreciated.
Regards,
Thorsten