Athlon64 board with ECC support?

[Peter Wemm]

On Monday 13 June 2005 09:16 am, Oliver Fromme wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm currently evaluating possibilities to upgrade to a
> 64bit system (preferably AMD).  I would like to get a
> single-processor Athlon64 system, no Opteron, because of
> heat, noise and power consumption (and price).
>
> Furthermore, I would like to have ECC RAM.  However, it
> seems that this requirement is not easy to meet.
>
> So far, Google told me that the Athlon64 and the socket939
> basically support ECC.  However, it also requires support
> in the chipset and in the BIOS.  I've looked at a few
> random socket939 board specs, and all of them allow the
> use of ECC memory, _but_ they don't support using it for
> actual error correction, i.e. they treat 72bit DIMMs like
> 64bit DIMMs and ignore the ECC part.  This is not what I
> want, of course.
>
> Now my question is:  Are there any Athlon64 (s939) boards
> that really support ECC RAM?  Any recommendations?

I was under the impression that the memory controller always supported 
ECC.  I know my socket-754 motherboard (asus) does.  I've checked the 
memory controller settings from within freebsd and confirmed that ECC 
is indeed enabled.  There is no chipset support required because the 
ram is directly connected to the cpu.  OK, I guess they could leave out 
the traces on the motherboard for bits 65 through 72, but that would be 
pretty silly.  And of course the bios has to turn it on, as you say.  
But thats all there is to it.

The real trick is finding unregistered ECC (72 bit wide) memory though.

I can look up the pciconf commands again to read the memory controller 
to confirm whether ecc mode is active if you like..

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5