Bad RAM on Mac Pro?

Hi folks...

I bought my Mac Pro 6-core in Dec2010, just before Thunderbolt came out. Ever since, I've had an randomly intermittent failure of both the video and sound going out on the LED Cinema. Apple's replaced the 1TB hard drive, backplane board, and the LED cinema display. Hooking up the Pro to another LCD display shows the same problem. They are changing out the video card now, but while the video comes via mini-display port on the video card, the sound comes via USB from the backplane so I'm not sure if that's going to do anything. FYI, the video card has 1GB of RAM on it.

Apple said yesterday that their test show that the RAM is bad. I had replaced the 4GB (4x1GB) Apple RAM with OWC 16GB RAM (4x4GB). Would bad RAM cut-out both video and audio completely in a randomly intermittent manner? The system doesn't automatically reboot or shutdown, just that the video & audio go out and come back on randomly.

How exactly does (4) sticks of decent-brand RAM all go out at the same time? It's hard to believe unless there is some common thread... to me, that would be the backplane, but that's also already been replaced.

Thanks for your thoughts.

tikku22 said:

How exactly does (4) sticks of decent-brand RAM all go out at the same time?

Click to expand...

One possible way (but not necessarily common) are electrical spikes/thunderstorms.

Have all of these previous/current problems been taken care of via Applecare? Is the computer still covered via Applecare?

If so...why not let Apple continue to deal with the headaches? It does seem that you've had a lot of trouble with this computer.

- Nick