Your opinion about this system

[mariushm]

Re: Your opinion about this system

Gianni, it just means the motherboard will work with the ecc memory modules as if they're regular ones.
The chipset just doesn't use the ECC information from the chips so that's why it says unsupported. It would make no sense to buy ECC modules that are usually more expensive but this board will let you use them anyway.

You probably didn't see the network driver in the autorun menu because it had no setup application.
It's there on CD - you just had to go in Windows' Device Manager, select the network card with question mark icon, select update driver and then tell it to search the CD for the driver and it picks it up automatically.

I don't know what to say about the cooler retention plastic - they should be standard and the same on all board - maybe you put the heatsink the other way around initially?

Ok, I hope it lasts a long time and you're happy with the purchase... nice to know everything's solved.

[Scenic]

Re: Your opinion about this system

@mariushm: the retention module is a standard one, but the socket on the board is not in the center of it (see 5th pic).

normally this shouldn't cause problems, but with some coolers it does (mainly the coolers with a contact area in the exact center, with the rest of it not making any contact with the CPU .. they won't cover the whole CPU when the socket is off-center like on this board)

[Gianni]

Re: Your opinion about this system

@ mariushm: due to lack of time I reduce myself to do things in the night... and as I get up early (6.15 am) I'm always tired and I try to speed up things.
I bought the ECC because they were in the Asrock list... and compared to other model in the list and on Amazon, the price were more or less the same, so I thought it was better to buy them. Well I learnt the lesson... next time I wait some day more and I follow your (Badcaps folks) suggestions.

About the network card it was not listed in the device manager with the yellow question mark and was not in the installed hardware. I took the CD and put in the drive: in the installation menu there were only Inf Driver, VGA driver and audio HD driver...
So I turned off and on the PC to enter the BIOS and I saw the network card was active.
I suspect that something went wrong during drivers installation from CD, I had not problem with drivers downloaded from site.
I checked again the CD and with the hardware installed I could see in the menu also the network driver, I think the I didn't saw it because the network card was not "seen" by XP.

For the heat sink Scenic is right: when I mounted the heat sink from Gigabyte MOBO only a small part of the CPU was in contact with it because it has round shape not very large. The second one has a rectangular shape and it cover the CPU but, since the metal hinge are placed on the extreme side, I think the pressure it is not optimal because one side of the heat sink is not leaning on the CPU.
I hope my drawing it is better than my English, so to explain better look at the attached draw.

@ Scenic: I agree with you about OST, they are for sure not good, but sometimes they works.

Ciao
Gianni

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Your opinion about this system

ECC is not quite the same as the older Parity type RAM.
Parity actually requires different wiring to the RAM slot [an added address line] and ECC doesn't need it.
So: non-ECC and ECC slots are all wired the same.

non-ECC chipsets should run ECC just fine as long it's not Registered too.
It just won't work in ECC mode.
The extra bit gets left hanging, which doesn't hurt anything.
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When it doesn't work it's probably because the BIOS was written to reject ECC.
[I imagine that is standard practice on non-server BIOS's.]
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I've used ECC in non-ECC boards before but that was back in the PC133 days.
The only real problem is that ECC is a little slower.
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People get ECC confused with Registered because most RAM is either both or neither.
Some people actually think it's the same thing.
UnRegistered with ECC is a little unusual.
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