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EH21 · Oct 1, 2003, 05:02 PM

Hi All,
I'm very excited about getting a new G5. I'm mostly doing digital photos in PS with some images being 1.8 Gb. Just loading and saving these files takes many minutes on my dual 500 G4 so I'm looking forward to the new maching.

My question is what's the best kind of memory to add in and will I see a difference in speed between the 1Gb and the 2Gb module pairs? Where's the best place to buy memory? I've bought from OWC with good luck before.

Also I'm probably going to get another hard drive. Can some of you with more knowledge recommend a brand/type to be used as my scratch disk?

Thanks,
Eric

AssassyN · Oct 1, 2003, 05:22 PM

I'd buy RAM from www.18004memory.com as I've bought from them before and they tend to have the cheapest prices and their RAM has never failed me.

I'd try to get at least 1GIG total, if not 2GIGS. I'd pop 4x512MB DIMMS in there on top of what came stock if you can afford it.

If you're getting another HD, head over to www.newegg.com for some nice prices on Serial ATA hard drives. If I were you, I'd try to match the size/brand of HD that comes in your G5 so you'll have matching drives if you wanna do a RAID setup.

striker100 · Oct 1, 2003, 07:07 PM

Crucial.com for memory.

rhogue islander · Oct 1, 2003, 07:23 PM

I second the crucial nomination but also wanted to add that some Corsair XMS PC3200 C2 ram I pulled from my PC works just fine in my Dual G5.

and yes, newegg is a great place to buy parts. Great prices and excellent customer service.

aaanorton · Oct 1, 2003, 07:33 PM

Speaking of scratch disks (kinda)...
What about one of those 10k RPM 36 GB drives (who makes those?) partitioned in half as an additional drive? Then you'd have roughly 15 GB for misc. storage and 15 GB for scratch disk. And it'd be fast, which is what you want for scratch purposes.

Cadaver · Oct 2, 2003, 01:00 AM

Originally posted by rhogue islander:
...also wanted to add that some Corsair XMS PC3200 C2 ram I pulled from my PC works just fine in my Dual G5.

Really? Damn, didn't work for me. Two sticks of 256MB Corsair XMS PC3200 Twin-X low-latency RAM (Platinum series) isn't recognized in my G5. Works fine in my PC (Asus nforce 2 ultra 400 motherboard).

Oh, EH21 - if your images are truly 1.8GB in size, I'd think you'd want 4GB of RAM or more for optimal performance. Big difference between having the whole image in RAM vs. paging 60-80% of it out to disk after each action.

Landos Mustache · Oct 2, 2003, 01:01 AM

Photoshop 7 does not recognize more then 2 Gigs of RAM though.

I have 1.5 and it flies like you wouldn't believe on my Dual G5.

denim · Oct 2, 2003, 09:42 AM

Originally posted by aaanorton:
Speaking of scratch disks (kinda)...
What about one of those 10k RPM 36 GB drives (who makes those?) partitioned in half as an additional drive?

That would be a SCSI drive. How are you gonna connect it?

vasu · Oct 2, 2003, 12:20 PM

The Western Digital Raptor is a 10,000 RPM, 36Gb, Serial ATA drive, so it'd work fine in a G5.

It'll work, and it'll be fast, but whoosh that's a hefty price.

-vasu

Jeff-Flowers · Oct 2, 2003, 02:36 PM

Is there any difference in the way that the G5 treat different memory configurations? For example, will the system work with four 512MB sticks as equally fast as with eight 256MB sticks?

rhogue islander · Oct 2, 2003, 03:02 PM

Originally posted by Cadaver:
Really? Damn, didn't work for me. Two sticks of 256MB Corsair XMS PC3200 Twin-X low-latency RAM (Platinum series) isn't recognized in my G5. Works fine in my PC (Asus nforce 2 ultra 400 motherboard).

The difference is that my XMS Corsair memory is the 'plain vanilla' c2 variety, not the LL type.

It is necessary for the SPD to include CL3 speed ratings for the memory to work in the G5.

denim · Oct 2, 2003, 04:59 PM

Originally posted by vasu:
The Western Digital Raptor is a 10,000 RPM, 36Gb, Serial ATA drive, so it'd work fine in a G5.

It'll work, and it'll be fast, but whoosh that's a hefty price.

Nice! So they're basing the SATA drives on the SCSI HDAs? Gonna be speedy. Ya get what ya pay fer...

Cadaver · Oct 2, 2003, 10:22 PM

Originally posted by rhogue islander:
The difference is that my XMS Corsair memory is the 'plain vanilla' c2 variety, not the LL type.

It is necessary for the SPD to include CL3 speed ratings for the memory to work in the G5.

Why oh why couldn't have Corsair spent the two seconds it would have taken to encode CL3 timings on to the damn thing. Oh well... back into the PC it goes. I'll have to live with 'just' 1.5GB in the G5 for now

fhammond · Oct 2, 2003, 11:53 PM

Originally posted by aaanorton:
Speaking of scratch disks (kinda)...
What about one of those 10k RPM 36 GB drives (who makes those?) partitioned in half as an additional drive? Then you'd have roughly 15 GB for misc. storage and 15 GB for scratch disk. And it'd be fast, which is what you want for scratch purposes.

That wouldn't help Photoshop. If you did that, you'd be no better off than if you just left the drive as a single partition. Photoshop cares about physical disks, not partitions. Now, *two* drives would be good! Personally 'though, I don't think you'd see much improvement over the standard drives that come with the G5.

fh

aaanorton · Oct 3, 2003, 12:06 AM

Originally posted by fhammond:
That wouldn't help Photoshop. If you did that, you'd be no better off than if you just left the drive as a single partition. Photoshop cares about physical disks, not partitions. Now, *two* drives would be good! Personally 'though, I don't think you'd see much improvement over the standard drives that come with the G5.

PS wants large contiguous disk space on a fast drive, preferably on something other than the startup/application disk for its scratch. I think this (10k RPM) disk would be ideal for this. And hell, leave it as one big 36 GB scratch disk; even better. Either way would be very nice.

Scotttheking · Oct 3, 2003, 02:10 AM

Originally posted by denim:
Nice! So they're basing the SATA drives on the SCSI HDAs? Gonna be speedy. Ya get what ya pay fer...

Western digital doesn't make scsi hard drives anymore, so they have no reason to keep the barrier between ATA and SCSI drives where it is.
The raptor isn't a bad drive.
If I were getting a G5, I'd use a raptor as the boot / applications drive, and keep my data on the stock drive.

As for ram, I'd probably go with 4X512MB sticks from crucial.

MisterRogers · Oct 3, 2003, 09:16 AM

To muddy up things abit more, I'm running 1 Gig of Cursair xms LL just fine in my dual. profiler lists my cas accurately, but no telling what the bios is doing with it. I've two additional sticks rma; I'm sure one of them was bad. I really do expect to be able to add my rma'd gig and have it work fine. When I get it, I'll do the benchmark thing, to try and see if the money spent for low latency ram was of any benefit. No complaints however; the Dualie is fast!

olePigeon · Oct 3, 2003, 06:55 PM

Originally posted by aaanorton:
Speaking of scratch disks (kinda)...
What about one of those 10k RPM 36 GB drives (who makes those?) partitioned in half as an additional drive? Then you'd have roughly 15 GB for misc. storage and 15 GB for scratch disk. And it'd be fast, which is what you want for scratch purposes.

IBM and Seagate both make 15K RPM Ultra2, Ultra3, and Ultra4 SCSI HDs, depending on how much you want to spend on the SCSI controller card. If you're only going to have one SCSI HD, you can use a single channel Ultra2 SCSI card (80MB/sec.) If you plan on getting two or three later on, grab yourself a dual channle Ultra2 (160MB/sec) or a single channel Ultra3 (160MB/sec). Or, if you want and have $550 to spend, grab yourslef a dual channel Ultra4 SCSI card at 640MB/sec then RAID that badass mofo.

For the HD I would suggest an 18GB 15K RPM HD (IBM or Seagate, both are good.) They'll run you about $100. Before anyone tells you that it's a ripoff, and why don't you just get SATA, it's the difference between 3.4ms seektime on a SCSI vs 15ms seek time on an SATA, and 640MB/sec sustained maximum throughput on the SCSI vs. only 150MB burst on the SATA.

SCSI wipes SATA all over the floor in performance.

killergator · Oct 3, 2003, 07:40 PM

http://developer.apple.com/documenta...section_2.html

this is the key info.....
For all microprocessor speeds and for both DDR400 (PC3200) and DDR333 (PC2700) SDRAM DIMMs, the Power Mac G5 supports CAS latencies of 2, 2.5, 3, 4, and 5.

MisterRogers · Oct 3, 2003, 09:03 PM

Yea, actually, what we don't know is if it works the way it says that it does. It was based on that document that I bought expensive memory. The jury's still out on whether It'll work as advertised.

killergator · Oct 4, 2003, 12:28 AM

The Serial Presence Detect (SPD) EEPROM specified in the JEDEC standard is required and must be set to properly define the DIMM configuration. The EEPROM is powered on 3.3 V. Details about the required values for each byte on the SPD EEPROM can be found on pages 68�70 of the JEDEC specification.

Important
For a DIMM to be recognized by the startup software, the SPD feature must be programmed properly to indicate the timing modes supported by the DIMM.

nredman · Oct 5, 2003, 06:58 PM

Originally posted by striker100:
Crucial.com for memory.

i agree or ramjet.com

EH21 · Oct 6, 2003, 12:04 AM

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

It looks like 18004memory has slightly better prices than Crucial, but doesn't specify much about the memory.

Here's a couple questions I had: Is cl2.5 better than cl3.0? And will 1Gb modules make my machine faster than the 512mb modules?

Eric