Memory for Mac Pro??

[miles_stylus]

I'm aware of one place (http://www.thomann.de/gb/prod_AR_203888.html?partner_id=59917 ) from the Disk Strategy thread however they don't have any stock anymore.

Is this the same stuff and will it work in the Mac Pro?

http://www.pcsforeveryone.com/Product/ATP/AH56K72E4BHE7S 

Does anyone know of anywhere else given that Crucial don't seem to be selling it yet?

Many thanks

Miles

Edited by miles_stylus on Thursday 7th February 07:57

[LukeBird]

I don't think it is I'm afraid
It doesn't look like the fully-buffered stuff (which is denoted FB-DIMM).
Mac Pro RAM is basically server RAM on an Intel server board, so it will need fully buffered and ECC registered RAM.

[miles_stylus]

drat. Thanks for telling me any road.

Miles

[LukeBird]

No problem, hope I didn't patronise you too much!

[miles_stylus]

Luke - there is no worries there, after all to be patronised I need to think I know something! In this game I'm a babe in the woods frankly!

Miles

[robbieduncan]

Even standard FB-DIMMs should not be used: Mac Pro specific FB-DIMMs have significantly larger heatsinks on them. Using memory without the correct heatsinks will lead to the machine ramping up it's fans, potentially slowing down the memory (to control heat) and can even lead to stability problems.

Others in the UK have been buying RAM for 2008 spec Mac Pros from OWC: http://www.macsales.com/ Import duties seem to be pretty low (<£40 on 6 gigs of RAM). Even if Crucial had stock this would probably end up being cheaper!

There's a thread running on this over at macrumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=41568...

[miles_stylus]

Thanks for that - I picked up on the OCW site something about 4 or more modules being best. I assume this means that you need to fill 4 or more of the 8 slots? Is it best to remove the 2x1GB which come with the machine and replace with 4x2GB or better to leave them in and continue with either 3x2GB or 4x2GB?

The same sort of quesiton was asked on the other forum but I'm not sure it was answered.

Nice forum by the way - thanks

Miles

[LukeBird]

miles_stylus said:

Luke - there is no worries there, after all to be patronised I need to think I know something! In this game I'm a babe in the woods frankly!

Miles

Aaah you'll learn
I'm certainly new to macs, so I can't claim much knowledge there!
Sorry, should have added about the heatsinks on the RAM!

[robbieduncan]

miles_stylus said:

Thanks for that - I picked up on the OCW site something about 4 or more modules being best. I assume this means that you need to fill 4 or more of the 8 slots? Is it best to remove the 2x1GB which come with the machine and replace with 4x2GB or better to leave them in and continue with either 3x2GB or 4x2GB?

The same sort of quesiton was asked on the other forum but I'm not sure it was answered.

Nice forum by the way - thanks

Miles

Exactly 4 identical modules is best. Less than this means you are not using the full available bandwidth of them memory controller. More means that some of the memory is higher latency (the second set of FB-DIMM sockets on each riser is daisy chained off the first).

When I get my machine in the next month or two I'll be going with 4x2Gb and selling the 2x1Gb that come with it on eBay...

[mmm-five]

Looks like Crucial have started to sell theirs...

http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/listparts.aspx?mod...

...not cheap though.

[Leithen]

Music Store in Germany is getting some good reports re price and brand - see this thread on MacRumours Forums.

[cyberface]

robbieduncan said:

Even standard FB-DIMMs should not be used: Mac Pro specific FB-DIMMs have significantly larger heatsinks on them. Using memory without the correct heatsinks will lead to the machine ramping up it's fans, potentially slowing down the memory (to control heat) and can even lead to stability problems.

Check that. My mixture of OEM and Thomann RAM (6 GB total, with monstrous heatsinks) is currently running mid 70s degrees Celsius with the fans idling; the system obviously thinks these sorts of temps are OK for the RAM because it hasn't ramped up the fans. I can't get the fans to work at all... if this box was a PC then it'd be an overclocker's delight - I'm maxing the CPUs and RAM and it's not even getting warm (apart from the RAM).

Those RAM sticks have honking great heatsinks on them though, never seen that level of nuttiness before - the G5 Quad had pretty silly memory bandwidth for the day but didn't need funny RAM...

Anyone know how to overclock a Mac Pro?

[LukeBird]

cyberface said:

Those RAM sticks have honking great heatsinks on them though, never seen that level of nuttiness before - the G5 Quad had pretty silly memory bandwidth for the day but didn't need funny RAM...

Anyone know how to overclock a Mac Pro?

I've been thinking about that as well
I reckon with decent air-cooling you would probably be able to it 4GHz and with water, as high as the NorthBridge could take you!

[cyberface]

LukeBird said:

cyberface said:

Those RAM sticks have honking great heatsinks on them though, never seen that level of nuttiness before - the G5 Quad had pretty silly memory bandwidth for the day but didn't need funny RAM...

Anyone know how to overclock a Mac Pro?

I've been thinking about that as well
I reckon with decent air-cooling you would probably be able to it 4GHz and with water, as high as the NorthBridge could take you!

It's already got decent air-cooling, surely... fans don't perk up off their minima even at 100% crunching time...

Shame that the only reason I upgraded from my Quad G5 was that the water cooling system in the Quad had started to fail... I wonder whether that would bolt onto the Xeons and go for 4 GHz

At current system temps (measured like a healthy paranoid and displayed on my main screen ALL the time) the only component that's warm is the RAM - in the 70s. The CPU cores are mid 50s, the northbridge is 48, the slots area (i.e. graphics card) hovers around mid forties and the disks are safely below 40C.

Thus I reckon the RAM would be the ceiling on overclockage. You'd have to up the CPUs without raising the memory clock too much... and at some point the memory bandwidth becomes a limitation as the CPUs can't be fed, right? (especially with 8 cores) Anyway all that silly messing was what drove me on to Macs in the first place... perhaps I'll leave the overclockery and fun-n-games to my planned Hackintosh and leave the Mac Pro well alone

Of course, if overclocking a Pro turns out to be a few EFI hacks then I may be signing up for my geek card again....

[LukeBird]

cyberface said:

It's already got decent air-cooling, surely... fans don't perk up off their minima even at 100% crunching time...

Shame that the only reason I upgraded from my Quad G5 was that the water cooling system in the Quad had started to fail... I wonder whether that would bolt onto the Xeons and go for 4 GHz

At current system temps (measured like a healthy paranoid and displayed on my main screen ALL the time) the only component that's warm is the RAM - in the 70s. The CPU cores are mid 50s, the northbridge is 48, the slots area (i.e. graphics card) hovers around mid forties and the disks are safely below 40C.

Thus I reckon the RAM would be the ceiling on overclockage. You'd have to up the CPUs without raising the memory clock too much... and at some point the memory bandwidth becomes a limitation as the CPUs can't be fed, right? (especially with 8 cores) Anyway all that silly messing was what drove me on to Macs in the first place... perhaps I'll leave the overclockery and fun-n-games to my planned Hackintosh and leave the Mac Pro well alone

Of course, if overclocking a Pro turns out to be a few EFI hacks then I may be signing up for my geek card again....

Yeah, the air-cooling certainly sounds good!
Interestingly (according to SpeedFan, which can be a little inaccurate) my reported temps are quite a lot lower than yours...
Idle-
CPU @ approx 28/30C
GPU (8800GTX, monster) 58C
HD's between about 18 (I have a cold room! ) and 25
NB doesn't matter for me as AMD chips have an integrated memory controller (on die)
Intensive to approx 100% load-
CPU 60C
GPU 90C although it'll hit 100C quite easily appraently
HD's no higher than 30C

I doubt you'd hit a memory bandwidth problem, as the FSB on those intel chips and the boards will be able to hit 2250/2500MHz I would have thought! The Xeon's (as are the Opteron's) are always the top-bin for stability, so they'd go far I would have thought!
The only thing is, with them not being 'extreme edition' chips, all OCing would have to be done on the bus, which is more restrictive than just bunging the CPU multiplier to 10 or something
As when you jump the FSB, as you said, you'll be OCing the memory as well.
Would be good fun though.
Intel, on their 'Skulltrail' system hit 6GHz with phase-change cooling on a set-up which is, in essence, the same as a Mac Pro.

Edited by LukeBird on Monday 25th February 20:35

[cyberface]

LukeBird said:

Interestingly (according to SpeedFan, which can be a little inaccurate) my reported temps are quite a lot lower than yours...

Probably because mine's crunching Seti work units 24/7 in a silly dick-waving attempt to show that a bog standard (and fairly inexpensive, all things considered) Mac is faster than 99.9999% of the machines out there (currently 7th in the world out of 1.8 million boxes)

Full-bore temps look about the same, my CPU cores never go above 58 but the memory's a bit toasty. Don't play games and the crap graphics card in the Mac Pro struggles to deal with my dual 30" apple screens... fired up Doom 3 to see whether the CPUs could make the game smooth, but looks fill-rate-limited to me... purty though at 2560x1600, but ideally it needs a *proper* graphics card for games. That said, I don't play enough to justify the additional noise IMO.

[LukeBird]

cyberface said:

LukeBird said:

Interestingly (according to SpeedFan, which can be a little inaccurate) my reported temps are quite a lot lower than yours...

Probably because mine's crunching Seti work units 24/7 in a silly dick-waving attempt to show that a bog standard (and fairly inexpensive, all things considered) Mac is faster than 99.9999% of the machines out there (currently 7th in the world out of 1.8 million boxes)

Full-bore temps look about the same, my CPU cores never go above 58 but the memory's a bit toasty. Don't play games and the crap graphics card in the Mac Pro struggles to deal with my dual 30" apple screens... fired up Doom 3 to see whether the CPUs could make the game smooth, but looks fill-rate-limited to me... purty though at 2560x1600, but ideally it needs a *proper* graphics card for games. That said, I don't play enough to justify the additional noise IMO.

Yeah, I've been crunching numbers on that as well!
I'm probably the 1.8 millionth person on there!
And yeah, they are crap graphics cards!
Hence PB and gaming PC. Which all things considered wasn't that expensive!
Although it's been re-built about a month and I already know my next upgrade (assuming I get this job I'm hoping will come up!) and it isn't going to be cheap!
Oh well, I'm a mug!