Q: 1600mhz ram on the mid-2011 iMac
Hi,
I currently have the mid-2011 iMac and was wondering if upgrading the ram to a 16gb pc-12800 (1600mhz) could be possible. Would this harm my mac in any sort of way, because I know that if I did the same thing to a motherboard on a pc supporting only 1333mhz, it would simply downclock itself.
iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)
Posted on May 28, 2014 6:02 AM
Mac's can be pretty fussy about RAM. It may underclock, or it may simply not boot, or you could run into other issues (ie freezing etc...). I'd reccomend using http://www.macsales.com to see what is recommended for your mac and going from there.
Looking around, I don't really see any advantage to 1600mhz for you. The max supported memory on your iMac is 16GB, and you have 4 SODIMM slots. Running 4x4GB sticks in 2 dual channel arrays would give you decent performance without hoping that it will underclock and inhibit the RAM performance. 4x4GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM is going to be your best bet.
| Number of memory slots | 4 |
| Base memory | 4 GB (but is configured to order) |
| Maximum memory | 16 GB Note: For the iMac (Late 2009) models, you can use 2 GB or 4 GB RAM SO-DIMMs of 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM in each slot. For the iMac (Mid 2010) andiMac (Mid 2011) models, use 2 GB or 4 GB RAM SO-DIMMs of 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM in each slot. |
Posted on May 28, 2014 6:38 AM