Mid-2010 MacBook has 8gb ram only showing 4gb

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Mid-2010 MacBook has 8gb ram only showing 4gb

I have a Mid-2010 “plastic” MacBook (running Sierra 10.12.6) I was given recently, decided to poke around aka see what could be upgraded (ram,hdd,etc) and to clean out the fan, I was surprised when I found out that it actually has two 8gb 1066MHz Apple OEM ram populating both dimms, however in both about this Mac and system report it says there are two 2gb sticks populating both slots, I’ve attached photos of what MacOS is showing along with the ram itself. also, after doing some info digging it seems these models can supposedly support up to 16gb total which I found quite interesting as it only has a core 2 duo for instance my Late-2008 unibody MacBook with the same cpu and clock speed can only support up to 4gb.

MacBook

Posted on Jun 5, 2022 9:26 PM

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Answer 1

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y_p_w

Level 6

17,642 points

Jun 9, 2022 10:33 PM in response to tsukuyomi_the_kid

Those don't look like OEM. Apple OEM memory is either unlabeled except for the manufacturer's (always a major OEM like Samsung or Micron) label, and/or it has a label with the Apple logo on it. I think that's typically for retail purchase, as I've never seen an Apple label on a factory-installed memory module.

That's clearly Samsung though. Take a closer look though. It's labelled as 4GB total for the set, but then as 2x2GB. So each one is 2GB and the report is correct.

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Answer 2

y_p_w

Level 6

17,642 points

Jun 10, 2022 10:07 AM in response to tsukuyomi_the_kid

tsukuyomi_the_kid wrote:

Thank you, I don’t know how I mis-read that

It's kind of odd. I've seen some labels that mention specifically that it's a kit with the total memory, but that label is kind of hard to read. I don't think that it's Apple OEM, but that shouldn't matter as Apple devices don't really need anything other than industry standard. Replacement kits are really cheap if you're just looking to play around with it.

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Answer 3

y_p_w

Level 6

17,642 points

Jun 10, 2022 6:22 AM in response to tsukuyomi_the_kid

Not sure who sold it, but I found something with a similar label sold on eBay.

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Answer 4

Lanny

Level 6

13,183 points

Jun 8, 2022 11:13 AM in response to tsukuyomi_the_kid

It's GB, not gb. GB=Giga Bytes, gb=gram bits

It may be that the DIMMs are defective or the memory slots are defective.

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Answer 5

Jun 8, 2022 11:34 AM in response to Lanny

Yea, I know I mistyped that, it’s possible the dimms or slots could be defective I do have other sticks of LPDDR3 but I believe they’re incompatible anyways so I haven’t tried slotting those in.

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Answer 6

Jun 10, 2022 8:08 AM in response to y_p_w

Thank you, I don’t know how I mis-read that

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Mid-2010 MacBook has 8gb ram only showing 4gb

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