HI! Wehn I buy RAM, I Buy from either RamJet or Ultra (Tiger directs brand). I have this set of 256mb 32x64 CL2 PC100 that works absolutley beautiful in my Beige G3s. But it wont do anything In my sawtooth G4. If i put it in, I dont even get the pulsing front light or any other signs of error, but on the flip side of the coin, they dont DO anything either. they dont show up in About this mac or in system profiler. In system profiler, It says the slots are empty. Any ideas what would cause this?
//wthww
See the post from dankephoto in This Thread.
Basically, they're finicky about RAM. I'll second the suggestion to buy from a vendor that will guarantee compatibility with your machine.
Ram for sawtooth is 133
not 100
That why.
The Sawtooth has a 100 MHz bus, not 133.
I've had no problems swapping PC100 between the B&Ws and Sawooth/Gigabit G4s.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60839
The paragraph about "Serial Presence Detect"... that's your problem. Cheap off-brand RAM often *doesn't* do that right. Most PC motherboards shrug and ignore it if the RAM you plug in spouts garbled nonsense, and just default to a "usually safe" set of timings. The G4 memory controller *cares*. It's also possible the RAM you have does report *valid* timings, but they differ from the Apple-approved ones. Apple's memory controller is picky/fragile, and thus the firmware is set up to only allow RAM chips which identify themselves as supporting a particular set of timings to be recognized.
More info:
http://chrislawson.net/writing/techref/010503.shtml
http://www.mactcp.org.nz/dimmfirstaid.html
Getting your RAM from a vendor which guarantees Macintosh compatibility really is the only sure-fire way of dealing with the issue.
--Peace
But thats just the thing. RamJet specializes in Mac ram, hehe. I'll just buy dome OWC when I get the money.