question for epox 8kha+ owners
 

I'm building a graphics workstation for my wife, I'm giong with the epox 8kha+ MB and a 1700+xp chip, my question is with the memory. does this MB support ECC? or should I just get regtistered DDR PC2100 ?

does the MB have to support ECC or is it just RAM logic?

Any help and suggestions on how to make this a really stable system is greatly appreciated.

No VIA Athlon chipsets support ECC or Registered RAM, in fact I believe that they are keyed differntly so they won't even fit.

can anyone validate this? I was under the assumption that registered dram simply helped with large memory configurations.

Hmm I might be smoking crack but I actually believed that ECC would simply not work in the 8KHA+ but it looks like it will work but simply not use the ECC functionality:

This is the recommended memory list for 8KHA+
http://www.cmtlabs.com/Quicksearch/E...sp?st=EP-8KHA+

Now I will simply shut up and say nothing one way or the other :)

But this is said on the EPOX spec page: (which also links to that other page)

"3x DDR-SDRAM Slots for PC2100.
1.5GB max. supported.
Non-ECC"

if you wanted real good stability, you wouldn't buy a via chipset anyway, I doubt ecc would help anything via

Yeah ECC is mainly used for servers becuase of the massive amounts of data that is being transported and used at the same time. With her... the Validation ram or ECC wouldnt have any effect on her work. In fact it will make the computer a little slower... not that she would notice..
Although the Epox does support the DDR ram it will not support the ECC spec... But its not becuase of the physical aspect of the ram or the slot it goes in.

Your best bet for stability and being fast is a a Soyo, ABit or a Epox. Rated highest on Anandtech.com.

should I still get the registered ram though? It should help If I max out the board right?

no it won't, just buy 256mb or 512mb of normal ram, and forget about the rest

crucial ram seems to be the choice of alot of epox 8kha+ users...thats what i have and im very happy with the stability even at 172 FBS

The only thing ECC memory is good for is in mission CRITICAL servers and dual Mother boards. The ECC is simmilar to the old Parity RAM modules from back when SIMMS were the thing to have :)

Technical side:

ECC memory is 72Bits wide instead of only 64bits. These extra bits act as testers on the RAM to see if errors are being generated. If a Motherboard with uses ECC memory detects an error, the BIOS is suppost to lock the machine immediately and give an ECC error message.

There is no reason to use ECC memory over Non-ECC memory unless the motherboard requires it for operation.

I could go into a more technical decription of how ECC is suppose to work vs. Non-ECC but I think I would bore all of you :)

Hope this helps