Is OS X tiger or leopard 64 bit

[foges]

I need to upgrade the ram in my mac some time soon and im wondering if tiger or leopard will be handle/use 4 gb of ram. My processor is a Core 2 Duo (ie. 64 bit), so the problem wouldnt be there.

Oh and can macbooks handle SATA II drives or only SATA I ?

Thanks

 

[her209]

http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=81

 

[Nothinman]

I seem to remember a friend of mine having 8G or so in a Tiger machine and it worked so either the kernel is 64-bit or is 32-bit with PAE enabled.

 

[ViRGE]

They're both 64bit. How Apple goes about it is a bit interesting (even I don't have all of the details) but for the purpose of your question the OS is capable.

The hardware is another matter. AFAIK only the newest members of the MacBook/MacBook Pro line support 4GB of RAM total, older ones didn't support the 2GB SO-DIMMs required for 4GB. Your MacBook may not be able to handle 4GB as a result. As for the drive, SATA I/II is backwards compatible, you shouldn't have an issue.

 

[foges]

Thanks guys. I guess i posted in the wrong forum, didnt realize there was a mac specific forum.

Anyways, my MacBook is rather new (1 year old), but they still sell it on the apple website with the same spects. It has the core 2 duo processor in comparison to the first ones that only had a core duo processor, im guessing thats what would have made the difference.

 

[ViRGE]

1 year old is just far enough out there that it may be a problem. Just because it's C2D doesn't mean it supports 4GB, there's also the matter of the chipset. Stop by Crucial's website and use their memory selector tool (you'll need to know the model number of your machine) and it should be able to accurately tell you if you can do 4GB.

 

[programmer]

Yeah, it's more an issue with the underlying chipset and hardware in your particular machine. Regardless of the stated specs, Apple is continually improving the underlying hardware in all of their products. Especially their laptops get frequent updates -- for example, the wiki page on MacBook shows there have been (at least) 4 versions of the MacBook since Early 2006 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook )

According to that, only the latest MacBook with the Santa Rosa chipset can use all 4GB RAM, previous couple of revisions are limited to 3GB. Leopard will make full use of whatever you happen to have.

As far as the drive, I believe SATA II drives are all backwards compatible with SATA I, so you shouldn't have any problem there.

 

[foges]

Damn, im guessing my macbook is the late 2006 version, according to crucial each of the two slots can only take up to 1GB, how stupid Guess ill have to settle with 2GB then.

What do you mean that the previous revisions are limited to 3GB ? (seeing as the macbook only has two slots, which can each only handle up to 1 GB)

EDIT: Never mind, i just checked out the Wikipeida link to OWC