Intel D945GSE vs Zotac ION ITX (was: Support for Zotac MB with nVidia ION chipset)

[Peter Jeremy]

On 2010-Apr-05 12:20:12 +0200, Jeremie Le Hen <jeremie at le-hen.org> wrote:
>Nonetheless I'm a little worried by what you said about the lack of ECC.
>Computers has been used for years before ECC came out and obviously they
>worked :).

Not really.  Most early computers had fairly extensive error detecting
hardware.  Early microprocessors didn't because the novelty of getting
an entire on a CPU on a chip was enough.  Most 486 based PCs supported
parity RAM but maufacturers and end-users found they could save pennies
by leaving the parity bits off.

ECC support was a requirement for building servers with microprocessors
and some support has trickled down to the desktop.  It hasn't been
really popular because wider memory costs more and most people want the
fastest, cheapest system possible to make their games render faster.
Occasional glitches don't matter.

With the current generation of CPUs, Intel appear to have made a
marketing decision to not support ECC on their desktop CPUs - if you
want ECC, you need to user a server-grade CPU (with a much greater
profit margin).  AMD have gone the other way and have have ECC support
in all their x64 chips except mobile ones.  You are still at the mercy
of motherboard manufacturers who decide to not include the tracks
between the DIMM sockets and the CPU.

>  Do you really think it might happen to be a problem?

There's no way to know.  Definitely, the added error checking in ZFS
have resulted in a number of "ZFS kept reporting errors and I found I
actually had bad hardware even though I've been using it for years"
reports.

>  Would an Intel board would compensate for this?

No.  The memory controller is embedded in the Atom and doesn't support
ECC.  If you decide to go the ECC path, you need to pick a different CPU.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20100405/58c2de4a/attachment.pgp