RAM Woes - Crashes - 2017 iMac

[atomicparker]

Hi everyone,

I got a 2017 iMac last Christmas with 8GB ram with of course the intention to upgrade. In Jan I went on amazon and bought (Crucial branded) two sticks of 16GB each, matching the specs for my machine. The problems didn't start right away, but maybe a few weeks after installation my mac would wake up at the login screen having crashed and rebooted while asleep.

A call to Crucial was no help, as what I had bought was apparently a different model number than their iMac ram, so an RMA would have just got me two new sticks of the same apparently non-Mac ram.

So I sold it locally, and a few months later went to crucial.com and got THEIR ram. Fast forward a few weeks and it is happening again, only this time with their "official" iMac memory.

What could be wrong? Have tried running the after market ram on its own taking out the factory sticks on both occasions. Still crashes, alone the 8GB factory stuff is fine. Fresh installation of OSX both times to make sure it wasn't software.

It's really disappointing. I'm going to call crucial tomorrow, but is it possible I got bad RAM twice? I'm handling it carefully putting it in also, as I"m paranoid about that kind of thing. Any ideas?

 

[nambuccaheadsau]

Take out the 2 x 4GB and see if the new ones run okay. And I take it they are 260-pin PC4-19200 (2400 MHz) DDR4 SO-DIMM low density modules?

\Here is OWC's full specs for your memory:-


https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/2400DDR4S32S/

 

[Fishrrman]

An impertinent question:
Do you really need more than 8gb?

I'd suggest you take the 3rd-party RAM OUT, run the iMac with the factory RAM for 2-3 months, and see how it does.

If it does fine and you don't get any "out of memory" warnings, I'd just run it that way.

If you are in a user situation where 8gb isn't enough, I'd try Data Memory Systems:
https://www.datamemorysystems.com/apple-imac-intel-memory-upgrades/

 

[atomicparker]

Thanks guys. I've done the factory ram thing for a few months before after the first batch didn't work out. Everything works fine. On a suggestion from a friend I took out the 3rd Party ram and put the factory stuff in the other two slots on the off-chance that maybe just maybe I have bad memory slots, which I am told is remote possibility, but it is possible. Will try that for a week or so. I'll know pretty quickly, almost every night I leave it asleep overnight it crashes.