Is third party RAM a bad idea? PB G4

JJMorgan123

JJMorgan123

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I recently replaced one of my 256mb DDR mac proprietery Ram chips with a 3rd party 1GB DDR Chip in my Powerbook 1.25ghz G4. I have been having mysterious crashes in my more intensive programs (Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop CommandConquer Generals), but I cant pin point the problem. I have been having hard drive issues of late as well and I am not sure what could be the problem.
 
3rd party RAM is normally fine. I'm running my Powerbook with 1.25 GB RAM with a 1GB RAM stick that was supplied by Crucial. No problems whatsoever.

If you are concerned it could be a RAM problem, try removing the stick you think is a problem, and work on your computer like normal. If the problems go away, it is probably the RAM stick.
 
One other thing that you can use to test is the diagnostic CD that I thought came with all the Powerbooks. You can run a series of tests on the RAM and on the hard drive.
 
I just bought a bunch of 3rd party RAM for my G5.. and though it shows up in the "About this Mac" area.. it shows up with different specs in my system profiler...
but it *does* show up..

BUT (and it's a pretty big "but"), it does NOT show up in the activity viewer and it is not being used by Logic Pro !! (I know this because I tried to load a piano multisample-- which was certainly not more than 4Gb!!-- and I ran out of memory !!)

So, this RAM is going back.

I would prefer not to say where I got it from at this point, as I'm not sure that I am a good test subject, and the company seems to have very nice policies about returns.

One thing I *will* say now is that the company told me I would not have any problem with the spec #s being different in the System Profiler. They were wrong.
I'm going to call Crucial and do the right thing this time.
 
djbeta said:
I just bought a bunch of 3rd party RAM for my G5.. and though it shows up in the "About this Mac" area.. it shows up with different specs in my system profiler...
but it *does* show up..
Click to expand...

I haven't had that issue for a while, but when I did it was because I was using inexpensive RAM. I would put a 256MB stick in and it would only register as 196MB or 128MB. I would put that same RAM in my PC and it worked fine. I think that the Mac may be a little pickier about what you put in it. Exchanging the memory from where you purchased would be a good start.
 
3rd party RAM is fine as long as it's not really cheap RAM. RAM must be installed in pairs on the G5 and each pair must be the same spec sticks. For maximum performance you should use all the same type of RAM in each slot.
 
Well, I didn't buy cheap RAM ($700 for 4 x 1Gb sticks) and it's not working.
Activity monitor doesn't see it nor does Logic Pro.
 
Price is not a good guide to RAM quality. The best recommendation is to buy your RAM from a reputable vendor that knows the Macintosh well and has a no questions asked lifetime replacement warranty. I have had excellent results, read that as zero failures, with inexpensive RAM from Crucial, Other World Computing, and Smalldog. On the other hand, I have had more than one expensive brand name DIMM module fail out of the box, and even one very expensive Apple branded DIMM that failed to pass muster after a firmware upgrade.

FWIW, in my experience, software RAM tests, even the one on the Apple Hardware test CD, only find gross errors. They almost never catch the subtle errors that often cause intermittent kernel panics.
 
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