How to get 4.5G ram in an iMac G5 iSight

[jeffmr4]

While it does say this on everymac's website for these two computers, getting this memory will allow you to exceed the 2.5G limit for ram,

4 GB Samsung 2Rx4 PC2-6400U-666

I recently purchased a stick off of ebay for $15 and it works well.

Cheers,

Jeff

 

[alectrona6400]

i actually did the same, although i'm still waiting on the stick.
how much of a performance boost does it give for you?

 

[jeffmr4]

Once I got the right stick it is a pretty good performance difference. Scrolling the web is much smoother, visuals etc. I think the OS can really use the extra memory. Let me know how it works for you!

 

[alectrona6400]

will do
also the internal speakers in my g5 imac started to blow out

 

[jeffmr4]

Bummer. You could replace them if you can find them. They're a little tricky to open but finding the parts would be the challenge. Not sure if usedmac.com would have them. Ifixit has a pretty good repair guide.

 

[Cory5412]

Neat. It's extremely common that Macs actually work with more memory than Apple specified, since typically the specs they publish were written before bigger sticks of RAM existed. (In this case, 1x4GB sticks of DDR2 weren't common until a few years after the Intel transition.)

Mac OS X loves RAM and web pages are on average 10-20x heavier today than they were in ~2005 when this system was new so it's not super surprising that web workloads benefit a lot.

For most other stuff it'll probably depend on what the exact workload is.

 

[Timpanogos Slim]

Could not find a Samsung stick, or any recognized brand with the right geometry, so i rolled the dice on a chinese ebay vendor offering "4GB 2Rx4 PC2-6400 DDR2 800Mhz 240Pin RAM Desktop Memory Only for AMD chips" -- it arrived about 10 days later and my imac g5 isight seems to be using it just fine.

I recall vaguely from 15+ years ago that in the late days of ddr2 before ddr3 took over completely, AMD systems could use high density dimms that intel systems could not. *shrug*.

 

[Unknown_K]

There are high density AMD only DDR3 sticks that Intel systems didn't like either.