[powerule]

I worked with macs at the recording studio but never owned one. My best friend bought a dual G5 w/ cinema display. And wants me to convert to mac so bad that he gave me his G4 Graphite 500mhz. I noticed in the profiler that it has a internal zip drive and 4 slots for ram. Being that it is a power mac, what is the maximum ram that i can put in each slot???
for some reason he has 4 sticks of 256mb in each.....I replaced our family PC with the mac and so far so good. We browse the net, download, homework, photoshop ( actually pretty fast ) and do our everyday stuff with it......Once i get very familiar with the OS i will get the new ones. a refurb g5 and a mactel.

any help will help, thanks.

[chris v]

That machine takes either PC-100 or PC-133 RAM, and the biggest chips are 512 Mb, so you can get up to 2 gigs of RAM in one of those.

Welcome to the club!

[Footy]

I'm not sure exactly which model that is but maybe you can find it here and figure it out.
http://www.info.apple.com/support/applespec.html

EDIT: Whoops.. scratch that, Chris is on the ball.

[powerule]

Cool i love it so far.....I have a dell 17 flat panel and its great.....I can do anything i did on my AMD xp machine.

[reader50]

You should buy 512 sticks from someone that sells RAM specified to work in your model. Most generic 512MB PC RAM sticks will be recognized as 256 MB if they are recognized.

The reason: When Apple designed the memory controller (sometime in 1999 probably), 512 sticks were almost unknown. They were possibly limited to engineering samples. 512 is achieved at the maximum column/row counts supported by the memory controller. By the time 512 sticks became common, the PC market mostly went with a different column/row ratio for that size stick.

You can see Mac RAM vendor prices for PC100 or PC133. Your model will take PC100. PC133 normally works too if the PC100 timing settings are present in the RAM like they are supposed to be.

[powerule]

I looked at my "about this mac" menu and a few things are interesting.

1 - The model reads: Powermac G3 ( pci )
But below it reads powermac G4

This IS a graphite model. NOT a blue and white.

2 - Under memory : It reads that it has 4 ram slots. at this moment, i have 4x256 sticks in there occupying all four.

3 - I cant find anywhere not even on the Apple.com site, that supports the claim that this Powermac will accept 512mb in each slot to total 2gb.

[ReggieX]

It won't, max RAM is 1.5GB: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g4saw.shtml

[reader50]

Click the "More Info" button in your About This Mac dialog. That opens Apple System Profiler (located in /Applications/Utilities) which will give detailed specs for your model. Click the Graphics/Displays section. Depending on which version of OSX you are using, you may have to click on the Hardware tab instead.

When the hardware specs come up, there will be info on expansion slots. Confirm that the video card is in an AGP slot, not a PCI slot. You can visually confirm that by looking at the motherboard.

There was a Graphite G4 released without AGP, that model is indeed limited to 1 GB using 256 MB sticks. But that model was only released at 350 & 400 MHz. It's odd that it says "Powermac G3", could you give us a link to a screen shot, or to a picture of your motherboard?

Assuming you have an AGP slot and 4 RAM slots, your system will indeed accept 4x512MB for 2 GB. Apple published the original specs when the machines were running OS9, and OS9 can make direct use of only 1.5 GB. So to maintain truth-in-advertising, Apple said 1.5 GB max useable. Under OSX, all 2 GB are fully useable.

I'm typing this on just such a system, with 2 GB installed. All is recognized under OSX.

[powerule]

It says PCI for sure. I think its the first one right after the blue and white. and it seems only 4x 256mb ram.

at this momoent its not booting up and iam typing from my AMD (yuck) as soon as i see whats going on, i will put up the specs.

[tr]

Originally Posted by ReggieX

It won't, max RAM is 1.5GB: http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g4saw.shtml

yeah it will. sawtooths can take a max of 4-512 sticks, for a total of 2.0 GB...in OS X. i think in OS 9, the system only saw 1.5 GB, even if you maxed it out. i have a sawtooth 450, and had 2.0GB in it (until i donated a stick to my mom's iMac DV SE ).

tr

[italiano]

A PCI Mac G4 is basically the same motherboard as the B/W with a G4 chip - probably someone added an upgrade to 500

[Terrible4130]

how fast would a maxed out RAM dual g4 be compared to a new dual g5?