939 Motherboards with ECC

[General Schvantzkoph]

Do any of the 939 pin motherboards support ECC?. The 939 pin A64 supports
ECC but none of the motherboards seem to mention it and the Crucial site
says no ECC for the MSI and Gigabyte boards. I don't see why they would
have left an important feature like ECC off since it's essentially free.
Is Crucial wrong?

 

[george]

Do any of the 939 pin motherboards support ECC?. The 939 pin A64 supports
ECC but none of the motherboards seem to mention it and the Crucial site
says no ECC for the MSI and Gigabyte boards. I don't see why they would
have left an important feature like ECC off since it's essentially free.
Is Crucial wrong?

oh... NOW you want ECC.

LOL.

The whole point of 939 was the dual memory controller without ECC/REG
memory.

El cheapo for the masses.

Nobody said it was worthwhile.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

oh... NOW you want ECC.

LOL.

The whole point of 939 was the dual memory controller without ECC/REG
memory.

El cheapo for the masses.

Nobody said it was worthwhile.

The pinout of the 939 makes laying out the traces for the memory interface
easier which allows for the use of a 4 layer board vs a 6 layer board.
Because the traces are shorter it also can use unbuffered RAM. However it
has full support for ECC RAM so there is no reason not to support it. The
other thing that the 939 pin part is missing, vs the 940, is two of the
hypertransport buses. The 939 only has 1 vs 3 on all of the Opterons
including the 1xx which it replaced. The loss of two of the hypertransport
buses is on no consequence to a uniprocessor system because those buses
were meant for interprocessor communcation. The single remaining bus is
more than sufficient to meet the IO requirements of the CPU, especially
since the clock speed has been upped to 1GHz.

 

[rstlne]

El cheapo for the masses.

The pinout of the 939 makes laying out the traces for the memory interface
easier which allows for the use of a 4 layer board vs a 6 layer board.
Because the traces are shorter it also can use unbuffered RAM. However it
has full support for ECC RAM so there is no reason not to support it. The
other thing that the 939 pin part is missing, vs the 940, is two of the
hypertransport buses. The 939 only has 1 vs 3 on all of the Opterons
including the 1xx which it replaced. The loss of two of the hypertransport
buses is on no consequence to a uniprocessor system because those buses
were meant for interprocessor communcation. The single remaining bus is
more than sufficient to meet the IO requirements of the CPU, especially
since the clock speed has been upped to 1GHz.

I think the big problem would really be finding non-register ECC memory..
I mean they are pair'd together normally so maybee it's purely down to what
the market supply's

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

I think the big problem would really be finding non-register ECC memory..
I mean they are pair'd together normally so maybee it's purely down to what
the market supply's

They do exist, Newegg list a number of unbuffered ECC DIMMs, but only upto
512M.

 

[Post Replies Here Please]

General> They do exist, Newegg list a number of unbuffered ECC DIMMs,
General> but only upto 512M.

Actually Kingston makes 1G unbuffered ECC DIMM's what funny is that
these DIMM's are cheaper at the kingston web site. Anyway I have been
trying to research the same question. The best that I have been able
to find out is the ASUS AV8 Deluxe for 939 fully supports ECC. The was
confirmed by reading the manual on the web site. Hopefully the manual
is not incorrect, but you never know. However, ASUS has had full
support on all their Athlon 64 motherboards for ECC support on both
nivida and via chipsets (socket 745). I think the nivida board by ASUS
for 939 also supports ECC but have not seen the manual.

Scroll down to the bottom of this link for memory modules for the ASUS
AV8 Deluxe.

http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/con...sp?SysID=+19150+&distributor=0&submit1=Search

I think the point is since this is already in the memory controller on
the CPU then why not include support? Can't save that much money not
to include this option. It is probably a matter of bios support,
please correct me if I'm wrong on this point. For the record most
other motherboard makers do not include ECC support for Athlon 64. I
read that MSI did for their 939 board using the nvidia chipset but
could not find this information in the motherboard online manual.

Since 939 is high end according to the review web sites you would
expect ECC support on a so called high end workstation motherboard. At
least intel includes support for ECC on their high end workstation
motherboards. I guess this is really a high end gamer motherboard. All
these different meanings for high end motherboards is confusing at
least to me.

Anyway ECC costs more than non-ECC at the same exact speed, and there
are no fast ECC DIMM's like non-ECC. Also when benchmarking ECC is
sligthly slower than non-ECC, but the user will never tell the
difference. I heard that non-ECC overclocks better than ECC memory but
never seen this confirmed in a review. However, the extra cost of ECC
is cheaper than some cpu fans or some cordless mouses ;-)). It is
amazing that folks demand non-ECC. In the total cost of a high end
computer it is not much at all.

One last point about ECC that is gotcha. ECC memory will run fine in a
non-ECC motherboard but the motherboard will not use the parity chip.
So that is a total waste to buy ECC memory to use in a non-ECC
motherboard. I have learned this the hard way ;-)).

Later,

Alan