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The Cabin >> Macintosh OSX >> RAM Limitation on Older G4 Macs
http://www.hondosackett.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1445009154

Message started by Fernando on Oct 16^th, 2015, 11:25am

Title: RAM Limitation on Older G4 Macs
Post by Fernando on Oct 16^th, 2015, 11:25am

Thought it would be easy to upgrade a Dual CPU G4 Tower from 1GB to 4GB by putting 4 - 1GB RAM Sticks in it because it has 4 slots for RAM.

It does not work out that way; because unknown to me until now that Apple put a hardware 2GB RAM Limitation on many of their G4 Machines (worst on laptops where it can be 1GB to 2GB, depending on the model). Thus one can put in all the RAM into the machine they want, its not going to read anything beyond 2GB.

Worst - This limitation gets worse when emulating the older OS9, where is becomes 1.5GB. Years ago during the 68K and PowerPC CPU machines, a Mac can address 16GB but at the time there were no such thing as 1GB RAM Modules, let alone 16GB. This was a theoretical high end these machines could go with the older OS. So why impose such a limit on the OS being emulated on OSX? It is things like this that makes me say "Apple Sucks The Oscar Meyer Wiener!"

A 4GB Dual G4 CPU system would have been a kick ass system, especially for the 3D graphics work that I am doing now. Looks like I have tone things down to 2GB. So I'm going to pull out the 4GB I put into it and put back the 1GB it had and order another 1GB (2 512MB Sticks) for it and put the 1GB Sticks into a PC. These 1GB sticks were originally bought for my G5 system but it turned out that the ones I bought were too slow for the G5, so I planned to put it into the G4. Now they are going to a PC. Talk about "Hand-Me-Down" RAM, I swear!