I’ve written before aboutand, yet again, I have been blown away by the competitive prices and speed of service.
In the early hours of yesterday morning I ordered 4GB of RAM for my new MacBook. With free shipping, it came to a bargain price of £72.83 (Mac:Upgrades are currently selling the equivalent Kingston RAM for £83.82). The free shipping is for an estimated 3-5 day delivery but it arrived this morning – just over 24 hours after placing the order! A few minutes later I had the RAM installed in the MacBook.
Some people will say that you need to use OEM-specific RAM because it’s the best available. Nonsense. If third party memory was unreliable then major OEMs wouldn’t be prepared to sell it and Crucial is a division of Micron – one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world.
Most of my computers now have Crucial RAM inside and I’ve had no problems. There is only one notable exception – when I upgraded my Dell Server a few weeks back, the Dell memory was horrendously priced but they would also sell me the equivalent Kingston RAM if I wanted it. Some people have reported problems with value memory (e.g. Kingston ValueRAM) but this was the full-quality item. Ironically, I only bought from Dell to keep things simple – whilst I was waiting for the memory to be shipped the price for equivalent RAM at Crucial dropped to a lower level.
There’s one more thing I wanted to mention – Crucial now have a memory advisor tool for MacOS X. You could always browse by manufacturer to find memory for a Mac but this makes the process even simpler, querying the computer to see what model it is, how much RAM is already installed, and exactly which components to buy.
In my mind Crucial have a better name than any other manufacturer, Kingston included. I know gamers have valued their brand over Kingston as you can get better overclocking with Crucial. Better overclocking means better quality assurance. Better QA means better quality components/materials. Buying branded memory from Dell etc. should be avoided at all costs if nothing but for the hole in your pocket.
Don’t do gaming or overclocking (shudder!) but can second anon’s other comments. I have never had a problem with Crucial memory and their customer service seems to be top-notch. Recommended.