Memory Upgrades: Quadra 900 and 950

The Quadra 900 and 950 have no RAM on the motherboard and 16 sockets for four banks of memory expansion. They shipped with 8 MB and can support up to 256 MB of system memory – twice as much as any previous Mac.

Mac Quadra 900 with Apple color display

Mac Quadra 900 with Apple color display

With the rear of the computer away from you, you will see four banks of four SIMM sockets at the front of the motherboard. Because the 900/950 uses older 30-pin SIMMs, you must install memory in banks for four.

Quadra 900 and 950 page from Apple Memory Guide.

Quadra 900 and 950 page from Apple Memory Guide.

Each SIMM socket can be filled with a 1 MB, 4 MB, 8 MB, or 16 MB SIMM. You can use different capacities in each bank, but SIMMs within each bank must match. The 30-pin SIMMs must be 80ns or faster. (Apple doesn’t officially support 8 MB and 16 MB SIMMs in these models.)

With such high memory capacity, the Quadra 900 and 950 are excellent candidates for using a RAM Disk. We especially like ramBunctious 1.5, which dynamically saves changes to the RAM disk to a disk image file on the hard drive.

VRAM, Where More Memory Means Less Speed

The 900 and 950 ship with 1 MB of VRAM installed. You can upgrade this to 2 MB by installing four 256 KB or 512 KB VRAM SIMMs (80ns or faster) in the four VRAM sockets on the left side of the motherboard. (The 900 and 950 only see 256 KB on 512 KB VRAM SIMMs.)

Keywords: #quadra900 #quadra950

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