Hi, all

I am going to buy one of the new Mac Pro towers. I think I'm going to go with the 3.0 GHz model. It's probably not much faster than the 2.8 GHz, but at least when the next round of Mac Pros comes out, I will go from being the mid-range to the bottom-range, instead of the bottom-range to the basement. It's a self-esteem thing.

My question, however, regards RAM. I was once told, in an Apple store, that buying more small RAM sticks is better than buying a few large RAM sticks. In other words, better to have your 4 GB of RAM be composed of 8x512MB than 4x1GB. However, I notice that you can no longer get 512MB sticks through the Apple store. And, neither Crucial nor OWC nor any other reputable vendor sells Apple-approved 512MB sticks. So, my option would be to go with non-Apple approved (and thus non-ECC) 512MB sticks. Is it worth it to go with the 512MB non-ECC, non-Apple approved memory sticks, so that I can improve my memory bandwidth?

I have read in a thread on Creative Cow that ECC is unimportant to video editing and motion graphics applications. Does this go for compression as well? Can anybody verify this?

And, finally ... no, that's it.

Your input will be highly valued!

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"[Final Cut Pro is] so pretty when [Final Cut Pro is] faithful to me."
-- Pixies

I would go with fully buffered ECC ram I just got 2x 2GB chips there is no need to go for small chips.
The wrong ram can cause all sorts of crashes and slow downs.

Buy from Crucial or Mr Memory its a third of the price than from Apple

Also read the manual about ram configuring its different on these 8 cores


Derek

With the 256 bit wide capability of the memory systems it is better to have 4 memory sticks, instead of two larger for memory speed purposes. Although, we really don't know actually how much it improves the memory access speed; theoritially - it helps.

And FWIW - there is no advantage to purchasing RAM FROM APPLE.