AMD AM3 Unbuffered ECC Ram supporting motherboards

[Melchior]

Because, there is no other accurate or concise thread on the internet; I'll make one.

Many cut-rate and 2nd tier motherboard manufacturers have been omitting the ECC feature from most AM2 and AM3 boards for quite some time.

Also note, this is about Unbuffered ECC (72-bit) DDR2/3 DRAM support.
(* Means there is support mentioned in a manual or docs)
(* Means there is unverified\unofficial support)

List for AMD 890FX Motherboards:

ASUS (All models)
Biostar TA890FXE *

List for AMD 770 Motherboards:

ASUS (All models)
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-US3 *

Please list other boards that support ECC, in this thread Thanks!

[Melchior]

It seems more models of Biostar boards support ECC without making any sort of marketing note... (see the BIOS manuals)

The TA890GXE series also supports basic ECC, and quite likely other models.

Also nobody else case about this?

I suppose people are used to crashing, glitchy flakey, crap that passes for PC's these days... *sigh*

[Adarion]

Good thread that. For servers or computers with a lot of RAM it might make sense to think about ECC ram und the likes.

[grantek]

I recently bought an Asus board with ECC RAM, it didn't cost much more for the ECC, certainly worth the convenience of not crashing, even if memory errors only happen once every few months or so.

[crazycheese]

I suppose people are used to crashing, glitchy flakey, crap that passes for PC's these days... *sigh*

You mean, you really saw even once in your life ECC memory to save your desktop or workstation from crash?
I don't think ECC makes any sense, at least unless system is constantly under extreme stress over 24/7 and that in very dense electrosmog.

[chithanh]

@crazycheese
The saying goes that there are only two kinds of people, those that use ECC memory and those that never had their RAID array written full of crap due to a faulty memory chip.

[crazycheese]

@crazycheese
The saying goes that there are only two kinds of people, those that use ECC memory and those that never had their RAID array written full of crap due to a faulty memory chip.

The subject you are talking about applies to workstation and desktop/ or server?
Have you already experienced the situation you describe?

I have 2x harddrives on my machine, but I dont do raid, but rather normal backups exactly for the reason that RAID is only partial backup. The situation you describe never ever happend to me and I can only imagine bit-flipping on very high-electrosmog devices such as rack servers. Can you report the opposite?

[chithanh]

I have had a RAM module going bad on me on my desktop. Luckily, it appears that it immediately caused the system to crash and not boot up again.

Had it instead silently corrupted my data over weeks, the situation could have been much worse.

That today's PCs can have 16+ GB RAM makes the potential for problems even greater.

[Ex-Cyber]

The situation you describe never ever happend to me and I can only imagine bit-flipping on very high-electrosmog devices such as rack servers. Can you report the opposite?

My understanding is that it's pretty much an unavoidable risk due to the presence of radioactive isotopes in the chip package and the presence of cosmic rays. You're just more likely to actually see it if you admin a thousand machines handling mission-critical data and running 24/7/365 than if you admin one machine running office apps 8-12 hours a day. There are probably millions of users who have had a soft error on their machine and never knew it because it caused some trivial error like making a pixel slightly more blue for 1/60th of a second.

I have had a RAM module going bad on me on my desktop. Luckily, it appears that it immediately caused the system to crash and not boot up again.

Had it instead silently corrupted my data over weeks, the situation could have been much worse.

I once had a board that would corrupt memory if all the slots were loaded and run at full speed. It happened maybe once for every couple dozen gigabytes of data processed, and I don't think Memtest86 was ever able to catch it happening. That was a fun one to diagnose. I assume that was because of some fudging of specs (capacitave load vs. drive strength comes immediately to mind.) rather than external causes, but ECC would have caught it a lot sooner. I think I used that machine for almost a year before suspecting that something was wrong.

[gpacster]

I happen to have a few sticks of ecc server memory and looking for a desktop mobo Asus M4A785M-T will this board run it? any suggestions on a mobo?Thx