iMac ram questions

I anticipate buying an iMac in the next few weeks and I have read about the need to increase the ram. I have also read in two other places that it is better to have the ram in pairs, but does this mean matched pairs? My authorized reseller said they would put in a gig of ram for $139 in addition to the 512 it comes with, giving it a gig and a half. They said this would be better if I wanted to up it to 2 gigs since I would only have to remove one 512. Is this a decent price?

TIA, Steve

Sounds a bit pricey to me. I got a gig from crucial for just over $100 for a g5 powermac.

You do need pairs - I assume the Imac has 4 slots, and comes with 2 x 256, and your guy is offering 2 x 512s. Then you'd junk the 2 x 256's for another 2 x 512s.

I'd say you need the extra gb (if money is a real problem, you'd gt away with another 2 x 256 to make 1gb), but the standard 512 isn't quite in the comfort zone.

After that, upgrading from the 1.5 you'd have to the max 2.0 probably wouldn't be worth the money. 1.5 is enough, I have 1.25 in mine and it works fine.

spong said:

Sounds a bit pricey to me. I got a gig from crucial for just over $100 for a g5 powermac.

You do need pairs - I assume the Imac has 4 slots, and comes with 2 x 256, and your guy is offering 2 x 512s. Then you'd junk the 2 x 256's for another 2 x 512s.

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The iMac G5 only has two slots for RAM. You do not need pairs. Plus, IMO $139 for 1 GB of RAM installed for you seems like a decent price to me. It saves you the hassle of taking apart the iMac (which really isn't that hard, but still..) and really isn't much more than what you would pay.

D3v1L80Y said:

The iMac G5 only has two slots for RAM. You do not need pairs. Plus, IMO $139 for 1 GB of RAM installed for you seems like a decent price to me. It saves you the hassle of taking apart the iMac (which really isn't that hard, but still..) and really isn't much more than what you would pay.

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I know I don't need pairs of ram, but from what I read it said that the iMac performed better with a pair of ram and so I wondered if they meant any pair, or a matched pair (such as two 1 gigs). I didn't think that $139 was too bad of a price for a gig of ram, plus I could just enjoy the iMac right away without having to think about immediately adding ram.

elocs said:

I anticipate buying an iMac in the next few weeks and I have read about the need to increase the ram. I have also read in two other places that it is better to have the ram in pairs, but does this mean matched pairs? My authorized reseller said they would put in a gig of ram for $139 in addition to the 512 it comes with, giving it a gig and a half. They said this would be better if I wanted to up it to 2 gigs since I would only have to remove one 512. Is this a decent price?

TIA, Steve

Click to expand...

This is what I found at Ramjet.com:
The stylish new iMac G5 has two memory slots, one of which will be filled by the factory with your original RAM. Memory does not have to be installed in pairs, but a performance gain is realized if memory is installed as matched pairs (i.e. same size MB module in both slots). This pairing enables your memory controller to address both DIMMs as a single 128bit memory bank.

So according to this, there is a performance gain if the memory is installed as matched pairs. Anybody have any experience with this?