I was given an ancient Apple Mac Pro - original MacPro1,1 from 2006. Actually I traded some beer for it. Dual 2.66 GHz dual-core Xeon 5150 (so total quad-core) and 9 GB ECC PC2-5300 667 MHz FB-DIMMs. It also come with a low end air-cooled dual-DVI Nvidia Geforce 7300 GT.
It turns out the 9 GB RAM consists of 1 GB of Apple OEM Hynix RAM with big heatsinks in a 2 x 512 MB configuration, and 8 GB of third party RAM in a 4 x 2 GB configuration. The machine works fine most of the time, but I have had one random reboot, and the restart feature doesn't work after the computer heats up. It will boot fine, and it will shut down fine, but the restart feature (like a restart after installing a software update) will only work if the computer is very cool. Room temp was probably around 24 C, so warm, but not overly so.
I noticed that the behaviour only happened with the third party RAM there. If I remove all the third party RAM, everything works perfectly all the time, even after the computer has warmed up. Rearranging the third party RAM doesn't change the behaviour either, but if I only have 2 sticks of the third party RAM, the effect is less pronounced. The Apple RAM gets hot, but the third party RAM is noticeably hotter to the touch. So, I think the problem is simply the lack of proper heat dissipation on the third party RAM. This is server RAM, but without the cooling setup of servers. These desktops are built to be quiet, so the fans run at low RPM, which is insufficient with standard third party server RAM heat spreaders.
Mac Pro 2006
Apple RAM
Third party RAM
I was wondering. If got some thermal tape and attached some heatsinks to the third party RAM, do you think that would do anything? Or am I just better off buying new RAM? Note that I don't want to actually use this machine for anything important so I don't want to spend too much money, but I would like to play around with it, and obviously 1 GB RAM is pretty limiting. I can get 4 GB RAM online with big heatsinks for a reasonable amount, and 5 GB for this usage seems fine. The RAM I can get online is either new 3rd party RAM with Apple-sized heatsinks, or else used OEM RAM pulled from old Mac Pros. If I were to buy RAM, I'd be inclined to go the latter route since I know the RAM has the exact same timings.
BTW, right now I'm stuck on OS X 10.7.5 Lion, but with Firefox Legacy I can get modern browser support so banking sites, YouTube, and online mail all work fine, and with the old Safari with Silverlight, Netflix 720p works fine. (720p is the max Netflix allows on this setup due to DRM reasons.) YouTube at 1080p is fine, but it struggles with 1440p, so I assume it's using VP9 (software decode). I could hack the OS to get better software support, or else just install Windows to dispense with all this nonsense, but as mentioned this is just something to play around with.
It turns out the 9 GB RAM consists of 1 GB of Apple OEM Hynix RAM with big heatsinks in a 2 x 512 MB configuration, and 8 GB of third party RAM in a 4 x 2 GB configuration. The machine works fine most of the time, but I have had one random reboot, and the restart feature doesn't work after the computer heats up. It will boot fine, and it will shut down fine, but the restart feature (like a restart after installing a software update) will only work if the computer is very cool. Room temp was probably around 24 C, so warm, but not overly so.
I noticed that the behaviour only happened with the third party RAM there. If I remove all the third party RAM, everything works perfectly all the time, even after the computer has warmed up. Rearranging the third party RAM doesn't change the behaviour either, but if I only have 2 sticks of the third party RAM, the effect is less pronounced. The Apple RAM gets hot, but the third party RAM is noticeably hotter to the touch. So, I think the problem is simply the lack of proper heat dissipation on the third party RAM. This is server RAM, but without the cooling setup of servers. These desktops are built to be quiet, so the fans run at low RPM, which is insufficient with standard third party server RAM heat spreaders.
Mac Pro 2006
Apple RAM
Third party RAM
I was wondering. If got some thermal tape and attached some heatsinks to the third party RAM, do you think that would do anything? Or am I just better off buying new RAM? Note that I don't want to actually use this machine for anything important so I don't want to spend too much money, but I would like to play around with it, and obviously 1 GB RAM is pretty limiting. I can get 4 GB RAM online with big heatsinks for a reasonable amount, and 5 GB for this usage seems fine. The RAM I can get online is either new 3rd party RAM with Apple-sized heatsinks, or else used OEM RAM pulled from old Mac Pros. If I were to buy RAM, I'd be inclined to go the latter route since I know the RAM has the exact same timings.
BTW, right now I'm stuck on OS X 10.7.5 Lion, but with Firefox Legacy I can get modern browser support so banking sites, YouTube, and online mail all work fine, and with the old Safari with Silverlight, Netflix 720p works fine. (720p is the max Netflix allows on this setup due to DRM reasons.) YouTube at 1080p is fine, but it struggles with 1440p, so I assume it's using VP9 (software decode). I could hack the OS to get better software support, or else just install Windows to dispense with all this nonsense, but as mentioned this is just something to play around with.