Can I use PC ram for my Mac G4?

January 2, 2006 9:33 AM

Can I use PC ram for my Mac G4?

Here're the specs:
Macintosh G4 450mhz AGP
128 megs of SDRAM.

I'm not sure how much ram OS 9.2 (we can't upgrade the OS - our bookkeeping program can't run in OSX) can take, and I'm not sure if I can just throw in any SD ram either. Do I have to do pairs? as in, 256 and 256 for 512?

posted by Sallysings to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You don't need to put memory in pairs in that model, and there's nothing special about "PC" RAM in particular. So long as you have 3.3V, 168pin, PC-100 SDRAM you'll be fine. You can put in faster RAM but it will be slowed down to PC-100 speeds.
posted by Rothko at 9:43 AM on January 2, 2006

450MHz Power Mac G4s use completely standard PC100 or PC133 SDRAM DIMMs. As long as they aren't SO-DIMMs (laptop memory) or DDR, you'll be fine.
posted by cillit bang at 9:54 AM on January 2, 2006

I'm running 512mb of 133mhz SDRAM in a G4 Power Mac (AGP). The sticks came directly from another machine running Linux on a Socket-7 motherboard and an AMD 333mhz processor. No problems.
posted by airguitar at 9:55 AM on January 2, 2006

Indeed, you'll be fine. All of my macs use normal RAM purchased from newegg.com, ramjet.com, or crucial.com. I can vouch for the service and quality of them all. If you go to newegg, I would recommend Rosewill ram. It's cheap, and it works just as well as the more expensive stuff.
posted by zerolives at 9:58 AM on January 2, 2006

Thank you all so much!
posted by Sallysings at 10:55 AM on January 2, 2006

we can't upgrade the OS - our bookkeeping program can't run in OSX

I haven't touched OS X since the very first version, but isn't this what the Classic environment is for? I remember running a remote-access application in Classic that wouldn't run in OS X.
posted by mendel at 11:16 AM on January 2, 2006

In case someone finds this thread in the future and is wondering what the answer is for a slightly different computer: Both Ramjet and Crucial have little apps that will tell you exactly what kind of memory you need for your particular model.
posted by aneel at 11:46 AM on January 2, 2006

You should be ok, but there have been issues with very specific Ram. You might want to read this and the accompanying comments.
posted by juiceCake at 12:05 PM on January 2, 2006