Bob wrote:
Roger Heflin wrote:Bob wrote:On AMD boards a program called mcelog (you will have to put it in cron) will work-most soft MCE errors are ECC errors either in the CPU or in memory, also something in the kernel (may require an extra module in some distribtions) called edac will also work. The edac thing will also work on *SELECT* intel boards, mostly on the intel side only the higher end (dual socket server boards) are supported, on AMD because the ECC is in the CPU itself it is pretty much supported everywhere if the MB will take ECC ram.Roger Heflin wrote:Bob wrote:That's interesting to have some real world figures, thank you.Actually the errors don't happen that often anymore, not sure exactly why, but I have monitored huge amounts of ram (10000+ GB for months) and the errors happen pretty rarely except on machines getting huge numbers of errors, in a given month with a machine with 32GB on it very few of the machines get any errors at all, the few that get errors don't usually get only 1 error.Bill Williamson wrote:ECC RAM corrects bit errors in memory which could cause a crash or other problems, these errors while rare are estimated to occur once a month per GB of RAM, I'm planing have 2 or 4 GBs and I'll leave the system up all the time, which is why reliability and low power consumption are a must.Bob <spam@homeurl.co.uk wrote: Bob wrote: > Unbuffered / Registered obviously. > Bad form Bla Bla Bla but just to update the list, the abit A-S78H also supports Un-buffered ECC RAM, it doesn't have FireWire though http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=A-S78H&fMTYPE=Socket%20AM2 <http://www.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=A-S78H&fMTYPE=Socket%20AM2>Why do you think that ECC vs non ECC ram will have any bearing on stability of a media computer ? If you're going ECC, why would you not also go SCSI?I don't disagree with wanting stability, but the reality is that ECC likely will not give you any.But, if you are monitoring ECC then this will give you a chance to know about the memory *BEFORE* it causes you machine to be unstable and crash randomly without you knowing why it is crashing. It would also speed up correcting the issue as you don't have to guess what the actual issue is.What do you use to monitor the errors?But those are quite rare on consumer side of things, when I get these boards setup I'll look into mcelog vs edac, it looks like edac is in lenny but not etch.http://packages.debian.org/edac-utilsIn the order of the vendors, Supermicro's quality is on average better than any of the other MB only vendors.It is really one of the advantages of the AMD cpus, as you can easily get ECC in them without buying a single socket server grade MB for a lot more money that you have to get with the Intel cpus.This is exactly the reason I'm after an AM2+ MotherBoard that supports it, I like these 2 boards [4] but I've had bad experiences with both abit [0] and asus [1] in the past in both cases not actually their fault but once bitten.. the only downside is the lack of FireWire which as Ron on debian-users points out that can be fixed with a PCI card, the only problem with that is these mATX are quite short on space and I'll probably put a DVB-C card in.Intel only though.
I forgot that since I have used a number of Supermicro AMD server boards, Intel only unless you are a VAR. They do have AMD boards for VAR's, just not for consumers, and the lowest board is a low-end server board.
See: http://www.supermicro.com/aplus/The closest they have use an Opteron 1000 and costs $260, it does have 6 sata ports, 2 gbit lans, and some higher end pcie ports (x16,x8,x4), but no DVI or HDMI even on the more expensive MB with video on it.
I hear you, one thing that saddened me was ULi being swallowed by nVidia, they were coming out with some pretty innovative stuff, Oh well, it can join 3dfx, S3 graphics and lodes of others on the wasted potential and shattered dreams pile.I'd actually like to get a system with one of the Loongson / Godson 3 chips when they come out, assuming they're available in a more capable all round package than the Godson2 stuff was.
Not sure I would touch a via again, I just figured out that my machine (with a via chipset) became unstable when I started using both of the via sata ports, it had been previously stable without them, using the via ports made the raid about 2x faster but prone to crashing the machine, and causing a number of other bad behaviors.
Roger