New 27" 2010 iMac i7 Memory Issues

i made my own thread asking for advice but i think this thread also matches my issue perfectly. does it seem like people are having issues with the 16GB samsung ram from OWC? they installed my 16GB ram now, i wonder if they would exchange for return for diff. ram....

Well I asked for a return of Samsung ram (16G) since I have problems with 16 G OWC ram.
That was a week ago. Since then no reply from OWC.

peterwillem

i'm going to call them tomorrow and see what i can do. if they will at least take this ram back i will just buy the samsung, you know? i had issues with my esata port (they installed) reading my external hard drive (which read fine on other computers) and some dude in their customer service with a thick southern accent tried to tell me it was the drive, not my port and that there was "nothing special" i needed to do for it and to call lacie. then he was going to give me an RMA # to send my entire computer (aka my working LIFE) back to them to take their sweet time "repairing" it instead of trying to help me troubleshoot it. turns out the computer just needed to be booted in 64 bit mode. i am just not really happy with them right now. :\

OWC will refund money as long as it falls within the 30 days since purchase. Or so I was told.


peterwillem

This is a follow on post to my earlier posts. My computer has now run 24/7 with 16 GB ram for over three weeks without any sudden shutdowns. I have had to reboot a few times for software updates. See my earlier posts for background.

I did have one issue. my computer would not wake up last Monday. I had to reboot it to make it responsive. That is the only issue I have had with my iMac to date.

OrangeKid, for my Mid 2010 i7 quadcore,

Is this the same RAM you got?

APPLE FACTORY ORIGINAL SAMSUNG/ MICRON DDR3-1333 PC3-10600 Modules (These are the EXACT Apple factory original parts)

16GB 4 4GB SAMSUNG/ MICRON SODIMMs $599.47

from here: http://macramdirect.com/imac.html

Yes that is the ram I bought on advice of another forum member. However as my iMac already had two 4 GB Apple installed ram modules, I only purchased two additional 4 GB ram modules from MacRamDirect.com.

Good luck!

i'm returning OWC memory for samsung. i'm on phone with them now.

it will be here monday, i'll report my findings after.

I have been running 16 Ghz OWC Samsung Ram fro a week with no problems at all. I did have the problem with Nu Ram which I returned to OWC. I am sure this has solved the problem for me.

I just wanted to update everyone. I last posted on Oct. 12th, the day I upgraded my iMac 27" with 16gb of Samsung Factory RAM from OWC. I haven't experienced any shutdowns or weirdness at all since then.

Thumbs up on the Samsung RAM.

Good luck everyone!

My iMac has now operated over 4 weeks 24/7 with 16 GB of ram as I described in my earlier posts without any sudden shutdowns.

My experience suggests there are no problems with mid-2010 iMacs with 16 GB of memory if the memory is OEM from Apple or other vendors.

Hi all,

I hope I'm not too "out of the subject" here, but just in case this would help for your particular problem...

My i7 is from january 2010, been working flawlessly until last week. I did not experience the shutdowns but very bad crashes throughout anything, and at last one kernel panic that basically killed my system, internal HD was damaged beyond repair Disk Utility or Techtool Pro could not fix it. I did suspect either a bad drive (it's one of the Seagates...) or a RAM problem. I have a second system installed on another HD and the problems were the same when booted from it. My iMac was in such a bad state that I was unable to reinstall the system on the internal HD, it would crash during the process. I ruled out the disk problem since I've been able to format and zero it and no surface problems where found. Either DIsk utility or Techtool Pro say that the disk is fine. Sure it could be a disk that is slowly dying but let's say for now it's not... Because I found a solution that for 2 days now solved the issue. I removed the 2 RAM chips that were sitting in the "non mandatory" slots (you need two chips in the upper slots to boot, the 2 others can be empty or half filled...)

Funny (sorry, scratch this... sadly...) is that the iMac will work fine with ANY of my 4 RAM chips if only these 2 slots are filled. If I have memory in the others it will crash. I can swap the chips, any combination works, meaning it's not the chips but either the slots, memory controller or motherboard... Now here is what worries me most, I don't have 16 Gigs, I have only 4. 4 times 1 Gig, factory RAM from Apple that came with the iMac (Hynix memory).

So this is what brought me here in this thread. Could the problem be not 16 Gigs but 4 chips ?

We all know that sometimes some Apple products reaching the same age start suddenly to fail "en masse" (Airport anyone ?). Don't hate me for saying this, but many of us have to admit this can happen...

Could the (wonderful still by the way...) iMac 27" i7 show these symptoms ? Did you just notice it because all of you to have 16 Gigs would have all 4 slots filled and being aware of a potential RAM problem, or is it really only 16 Gigs or the type of RAM that would be the cause of your problems ?

Could there be a new plague of memory problems because something is wrong with the motherboard, slots, controller or else..? Oh and this might not be linked at all to the problem, but I remember seeing some time ago a warning from Intel about the core i7 and RAM. Something about possible damage to RAM chips or controllers if the voltage was set too high (sorry I don't have much more details about this... just came back to my memory...)

Well anyway for now I'm just lost with my problem not knowing too much what I can do. In case you felt that my situation is not relevant to what you were talking about, please forgive me. But maybe it could help that you check if for example working with less memory but 4 chips gives you the same problems as with 16 gigs.

Sorry my post was long, but as a reminder, my iMac worked perfectly till recent days and it seems to be caused by the second bank for the RAM...

[Edit] : just forgot to say that Apple Hardware test does tell me there is a memory problem if I have 4 slots filled, but not all the time. I always ran the test when switching the chips, never any error with any combination of only 2 chips, and MOST OF THE TIME errors if I have 4. So the problem is there but might go undetected (or not even show up depending on the usage of the Mac ?) from time to time. And again I ruled out bad chips since I really tried a lot of different combinations, any of my 4 can let the iMac run smoothly for more than a few days if only 2 are used...

Ok, my bad, sorry to have "polluted" the thread, but finally after more thorough testing (well mostly longer testing...) it appears that one of my RAM stick was dying. In fact it definitely did this morning. So my problem wasn't it seems with the second bank but with this component.

Good luck to you all to solve your problem.

PS : good thing in this is that I discovered the small soft called "memtest" that you can launch when booted in single user mode and that is really good at testing those sticks.

i just wanted to follow up on my earlier comments..

i replaced the OWC ram with samsung ram (from OWC) on the 27th of october at 1am and have had no shutdowns since. i have not restarted/shut down the machine since then either. i think we found the culprit, in my case at least. 🙂