Athlon64 board with ECC support?

[Oliver Fromme]

Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org> wrote:
 > On Monday 13 June 2005 09:16 am, Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > 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.

Thanks for the information.  So that means, basically,
the only thing that might prevent a board from supporting
ECC is the BIOS, right?

A friend of mine has got an MSI K8T Neo2-FIR (socket939).
The board's manual specifically says that it does _not_
support ECC memory (although it's possible to put ECC RAM
modules into the slots, the ECC bits won't be used).
BTW, apart from not supporting ECC, the board runs fine
with FreeBSD and Solaris.

So the question remains:  Can anyone recommend a socket939
board that definitely supports ECC RAM?  (That means, a
board with a BIOS which can flip the "ECC enable" bit.)

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

That doesn't seem to be difficult over here.  The well-
known German online-shop "Alternate" (www.alternate.de)
offers various brands, sizes and speeds of non-registered
ECC DDR modules (Buffalo, Infineon, Kingston, Transcend),
even at reasonable prices.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
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