AFAIK there is no problem mixing and matching different timing RAM: system will run at the speed of the slowest module. I don't think anybody will notice the difference with CAS latency Coot'ing and Refmac'ing.
I don't think there is much sense in having more than 4 GB of RAM per physical core on a Mac. Majority of the Mac flock does not really care for where the RAM modules come from. As for Mac Pro's- they use ECC RAM with proprietary heat sensors, so that's a completely different story. You can still use generic ECC RAM in a MAC PRO at the cost of the fan being stuck in hurricane mode. The bottleneck of pretty much any modern system is the HDD. Apple-branded HDDs were known to have somewhat modified firmware, causing problems at times (mostly with AppleRAID, if not using an Apple-branded HDD) An end user most definitely will notice an SSD VS HDD, which brings up TRIM support on OS X, which is limited to controllers sold by Apple. Upgradeability-wise Apple is not the way to go in any case. DISCLAIMER: The rest may be much more inflammatory. Personally, I am not convinced OS X and Apple is the way to go log term (having been surrounded by MACs for the past 4-5 years) I am not happy with the direction OS X is going. Too much emphasis on eye candy and not enough on underlying technology. ZFS (long ago), Xgrid and X11 have been ditched, which I find disturbing. I don't see Apple investing in computers given current revenue from that sector. Linux in a virtual machine of your choice might be a better bang for the buck. Or, Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box for that matter. Don't kick me, DIR On 2013-01-22, at 7:22 PM, Bryan Lepore <bryanlep...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Phil Jeffrey <pjeff...@princeton.edu> wrote: > I don't think that anybody has shown a significant performance difference on > Apple memory vs a reasonable 3rd party supplier. Apple may potentially have > better quality controls but places like Crucial essentially have lifetime > warranties on their memory. I use Crucial at home and at work. [...] > > sure, I agree with all this > > the only other point I really wanted to make is to be cautious when > configuring a computer on the Apple website, where they might say for memory > "DDR3 ECC SDRAM" (checked this for a Mac Pro just now) but that is a > non-obvious way of, from what I can tell, selling only high end memory when > e.g. different CAS latency is available elsewhere - again, not obvious what > their CL is (perhaps it is listed somewhere). and maybe other specs apply.
