Least expensive type of RAM for 2010 Mac Pro???

Don't by RAM from anywhere other than OWC or Crucial. Macs are notoriously picky about RAM. Installing it yourself is relatively easy, but trying to do it on the cheap will be a disaster.

No. I don't recommend it at all. You could get lucky, but more than likely, it will not work or won't work reliably, resulting in random panics and crashes.

No problem. Many of us here learned this lesson the hard way.

My advice differs slightly from the previous answer.

Tell the Vendor what Mac you have, and have them tell YOU what memory to Install.

Buy only from Vendors who can tell you:

"It works in your Mac,

or your money BACK."

These folks also give good results following that rule:

http://www.datamemorysystems.com/apple-mac-pro-memory-upgrades/

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check out the display in:

Activity Monitor > Memory

• Anything other than all green when you are doing your most intensive work indicates that you will get a substantial speedup from having more real RAM memory.

• already all green indicates the effect of more memory will be more subtle.

Most Mac Pros used for professional work are I/O bound, unless you have worked to fix the inherent I/O bottlenecks. If you are using one drive for everything, changing to a Boot Drive organization (with User data on another drive) will give you a remarkable speedup. If the boot drive is a fast drive, the payback will be higher. If the Boot Drive is a low latency SSD, the improvement will be remarkable -- like having a new machine.

User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

Another way to get additional speed improvement while editing, although not as pronounced as using a separate Boot Drive, is to use separate drives for each of:

System/Boot/Applications (with "regular" User data on a different drive)

Source for editing input

Destination for editing output

Scratch/Sound sample Library of appropriate size for work files

More RAM will not make it faster, an SSD will.

I have to agree with csound1. If you didn't already have 16GB of RAM, more RAM would be higher on the list of things that would improve performance, but at this point, an SSD will help a lot more, depending on what it is you're doing, of course.

With due respect to Csound1 and KiltedTim, I agree with Grant Bennett-Adler that if you are now seeing the memory pressure go up into the red regularly or even into the yellow much of the time, then you will notice the payback of more physical memory. Switching to an SSD for the system/paging volume will certainly help also, of course. As KiltedTim mentioned, a lot depends on just what combination of things you are doing.

markwmsn wrote:

With due respect to Csound1 and KiltedTim, I agree with Grant Bennett-Adler that if you are now seeing the memory pressure go up into the red regularly or even into the yellow much of the time, then you will notice the payback of more physical memory.

If it is you have a point, but with 16GB already fitted it's very very unlikely.