12 September 2014

Mac Pro Adventure

The little boards that hold the RAM have little LEDs on them that light up red to show you what stick of RAM is defective.

That you can only see if you open the case while the machine is running.

If one of your RAM sticks goes bad, the system profiler shows the pair with the bad stick as empty slots not as bad.

The cheap no-heat sink 240 pin 1gb PC2 6400 FB-DIMMs I bought way back in 2008 only lasted six years I'm actually impressed.  Of course the heat-sinked RAM that came with the machine (2x 1gb) is still clicking along...  Correction:  I realized that I couldn't find the soda straw from the canned air I dusted the thing out with so I opened it back up and noticed that it's the OEM heavily heat sinked RAM stick that's dead and not the Kingston RAM I'd added.  Fascinating!

So I ordered the smallest amount of RAM with heat-sinks that I could to replace the single dead 1gb stick...  2x 2gb sticks.  Since you have to do RAM in matched pairs on a Mac Pro the single good 1gb of my previous upgrade is trash.  Installing the new RAM will give me a total of 6gb of RAM instead of the previous 4gb.

I guess that's a win?

In fact I settled on 4gb way back because my Bootcamp partition was for XP-Pro and going for more than that was a waste.  I'm running Win-7 Ultimate (64) there now, so 6gb will get utilized.

The waiting for shipping is all.
Posted by Angus McThag at 13:43
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