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Otherworld Memory
Okay, I’ve seen the recommendations in the forums frequently enough. I can take a hint. More memory = more horsepower and better rendering. Since i usually like things as close to better as I can get them, I followed Kevin Camp’s suggestion to another poster to look at otherworldcomputing.com for memory modules. I’m trusing his experience with them assures their memory is acceptable quality for my Mac Pro.
I must admit I’m nervous simply because I checked Apple’s site after placing my order just to remind myself of the price difference.
Once I looked at what their 8×2 (16GB)cost, I needed a new word for YIKES!. My order costs $375, and Apple charges nearly TEN TIMES that
for the same thing? I know there are often lower cost options than straight from the manufacturer (like genuine car parts vs. aftermarket ones) but at a tenth of the price it’s hard not to imagine you’ll open the box and find modules made out of cardboard and thumbtacks. Or that Apple’s are made of solid gold and diamonds. It’s just an insane markup. Too bad otherworldcomputing doesn’t sell the whole computer, it’d probably cost about $279!I’m assuming that an 8 module set should be put in as a complete replacement to the existing memory the Pro shipped with (4×1), and what’s in there now gets removed. I guess I then have the option of hanging on to the Apple memory or using otherworld’s “buy back” program.
I just can’t escape the feeling that I’ve got to take a “hit” somewhere for saving so much over the “official” memory option. Who would ever opt for the 32 GB installed by Apple unless they had a “Brewster’s Millions” thing going on?
I want my After Effects workflow to keep frustration and bogging down to a minimum, so I hope these will work just as well despite their bargin bin price tag. $300-400 is more in line with what I’d expect to pay, anyway, considering the cost of something like a 1TB hard drive by comparison.
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8 Replies
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if you want to spend a bit more but have better piece of mind, crucial.com has 4gb kits (2x2gb modules) for $119, so you’d be looking at around $500 for 16gb.
crucial is a subsidiary of micron, the guys who make the memory chips, not just the modules, so you should be pretty sure of the quality and that all the chips are of the same make/manufacturer on all the modules. i used to always order from crucial, they used to be apple’s supplier for ram (they may still be, i don’t know), but i started using owc after hearing lots of good things about their products and prices.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks for the tip, but it’s already on the way. If you haven’t experienced any problems with the modules from OWC, I’ll trust in that for now. Should I notice an across the board performance boost in just about any app as soon as these are in? I’ve never quadrupled the RAM in a system I’ve already been using before.
I’m sure Apple’s prices are inflated for various reasons both obvious and not so obvious, and there’s perhaps a higher spec to what they place in the case for you, but I’m just not on board with paying a 1000% difference.
I used after market memory in my old iMac DV SE 9 years ago and had no trouble (other than the fact that it was still only 256 MB up from 128, hard to believe that was enough at the time), and they seem to offering an acceptable amount of guarantees, so I’m not too worried yet.
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[James Roberts] “Should I notice an across the board performance boost in just about any app as soon as these are in?”
in most cases you won’t see a huge performances increase… most applications are 32-bit so they will only use 3gb, however you can have more applications open, each grabbing 3gb, and see a lot less performance loss as applications are forced to write ram overflow to disk.
ae cs3 (and higher) with multiprocessing on, however, will grab up to 2gb of ram per core for rendering. so if you have an 8-core mac, cs3+ and enable multiprocessing, you can utilize all that ram and all your cores and should see a performance boost, particularly for any processor intensive effects/compositions, like 3d, particle systems, mesh warp, etc.
now, many of apple’s pro apps are 64-bit, and will utilize all that ram and most of the cores (i think motion is still limited to 2 or 4 cores, but many of the others use all of them). so, for example, if you use compressor and do some hd encoding, you should some benefits.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
That actually sounds more like what I thought. I should still see the advantage in a few places, though, since I’m also running Final Cut Studio 2, Shake, and Adobe Production Premium CS4. I also do have a habit a keeping other apps open sometimes, so it ‘s good to know performance may be improved there, too.
I had them shipped to my time and energy sapping day job, and they arrived today. I waited a little while to put them in because they were pretty cold from being in the car for a couple hours (low 30s today). Very easy to install, and a nice feeling now to click on “about this mac” and see the new 16 there.
I appreciate your taking the time to post a couple responses here. You seem to be a bit of a RAM performance guru on these forums, so I feel pretty secure taking your advice. Thanks again!
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I can back up everything Kevin has said regarding RAM. I use OWC RAM in all of my studio’s Macs, and haven’t had any issues.
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
Good to hear. Everything seems fine here as well. I did have one issue over the weekend, but I don’t know if I can attribute it to the RAM. I was setting up an experiment in Motion 3 and when I added in a light, the whole app went into wonky slo-mo. As soon as I removed it, I was working in real time again. This could be the result of many things, but I hope it’s nothing to do with the RAM. Everything else I’ve tried is fine so far, if not a bit quicker.
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with motion you most likely hit a problem with your video card…. either an opengl feature that is not well supported or maybe that one extra piece put your scene over the vram of your card (it’s pretty easy to exceed 256-512mb of vram)…
i think the limited vram of video cards is the downfall of motion, but the realtime or near-realtime feedback for setting up a particle system is still pretty incredible. i wish they made it as a plugin for ae, or added that feature to particular as an option just for setting up the system (not compositing on layers)… that little mouse-click preview window just isn’t enough.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks Kevin. I hope that’s what it was, though the project didn’t seem much different than the last time I added a light to something and it was fine then. I’ll have to see how the lighting works in Ae, since that’s where I’ll really be using the setup I was playing around with when it happened.
I guess it’s a matter of finding out what each app’s specialties are, and using them accordingly. There’s significant overlap of features with all that I’ve got, so maybe Motion is best for certain things, Shake for others, and Ae for yet more. I stocked up on all this within about two months, so it’s been a sudden flood of learning each app’s strengths.
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