The Mac Pro Tower is a workstation manufactured by Apple Inc. These machines use an Intel 5400 chipset and Xeon microprocessors. The Intel Xeon CPUs currently are used in quad and 8-core Mac Pro Towers. The original Mac Pro's main memory used 667 MHz FB-DIMMs. its successor uses 800 MHz FB-DIMMs. These modules are installed in pairs, one each on two riser cards. The cards have 4 DIMM slots each, allowing a total of 32 GB of memory (8 x 4 GB) to be installed. Due to its FB-DIMM architecture, installing more RAM in the Mac Pro will improve its memory bandwidth, but may also increase its memory latency.With a simple install of a single FB-DIMM the peak bandwidth is 8 GB/s, but this can increase to 16 GB/s by installing two FB-DIMMs, one on each of the two buses, which is the default configuration from Apple. While electrically the FB-Dimms are standard. Because of heat problems, Apple requires that users use larger-than-normal heatsinks on the memory modules that they install. Normal sized FB-Dimm heatsinks will not work in Mac Pro Towers.
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Mac Pro |