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Archive for December 16th, 2009

OWC Participates In “National Free Shipping Day”

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 | Author: OWC Eileen

GlobemanShoppingFree lunch is good; “Free Bird” is better; but best of all is National Free Shipping Day, this year falling on Thursday, Dec. 17. This is the day declared to be the latest possible day in the Christmas shopping season that, on average, retailers can offer free shipping and guarantee delivery by December 24th.

OWC is participating in the second annual National Free Shipping Day for orders $150 or greater. In fact, OWC announced this policy on Nov. 19, so  in effect, every day since then has been OWC free shipping day for orders $150 or greater.

Free shipping for orders $150 or greater will officially continue through Dec. 31, from OWC’s on-line catalog of over 2,500 products. Orders that ship by ground by this Thursday, Dec. 17, will still be on schedule  for delivery on or before next Thursday, Christmas Eve, even to the West Coast! And who knows, we may just decide to continue this program going forward. Make sure to visit the blog or subscribe to OWC Larry’s Tips n’ Deals Newsletter for any update on our free shipping offer.

To make sure you get something for everyone on your list and get it delivered by 12/24, visit the OWC Holiday Deal page for the latest deals.

And even if you’re the last minute type – with our special Priority Processing shipment option, you can order as late as 10:30PM Central Time for nearly guaranteed Same Day Ship Out – so there is still plenty of time to get all the tech gear on your Christmas list from OWC for the best Christmas morning ever.

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Category: OWC Difference, Special OWC Deals
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You CAN put 64GB RAM in your 2009 Mac Pro 8-Core!

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

rollercoaster-RAMThe tried and true rule of rollercoasters: “Please remain in your seat until the ride has come to a complete stop” certainly pulled into our testing station late yesterday. We had a few more tests to run in our MaxRAM qualification process and I’d like to take this moment to update the answer to our obvious question from my post yesterday…

Can I install 64GB of memory in my Mac Pro 8-Core with 8 memory slots and really make my Mac Pro lightning fast?

And the answer is, um, well… YES! you can do it- with a condition.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 seems to be limited to 32GB of addressable memory in 32-bit mode. We filled up all the memory slots in one of our Mac Pro 8-Core machines with OWC 8GB modules. System Profiler had no issues in recognizing all the memory, in fact, Apple Hardware Test passed with flying colors. BUT, when we opened Activity Monitor in preparation for taxing all the memory in the system, we found that it was only reporting 32GB of available memory to the system.

However, when we booted to 64-bit mode (by holding down the 6 and 4 keys during boot) Activity Monitor reported the full 64GB of memory as usable. And boy was it ever usable. We ran a series of memory tests that works its way through each Gigabyte of memory so that all the memory in the system is tested to be usable without any degradation to performance.

So the simple answer is to boot your Mac Pro into 64-bit mode to take advantage of such a large amount of memory.

Realistically, at this point, there aren’t many 64-bit programs that are going to take advantage of that much memory…yet. But OWC has you covered when future advancements in programming are made – we’re anxiously awaiting a release of a full 64-bit capable version of Adobe’s Creative Suite ourselves – to fully utilize that much memory in the system. If you’re looking to be ready before that time happens, or if you have already found a 64-bit program that is craving more memory in your workflow, OWC has our 32GB set available – simply purchase two to maximize the memory in your Mac Pro.

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance, OWC Difference, Product Spotlight
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