can you mix ecc and non-ecc?

[CrowDog]

have a mobo with 2x64 samsung rdram pc800 non-ecc. a guy wants to sell 2x256 samsung ecc rdram. Can I add this or will I need to remove my non-ecc?

And how can I be 120% sure my mobo will take the ram....it says that ecc is supported. Does that mean all rdram ecc will work?

thanks


The mobo is a Intel d850gb by the way

 

[Regs]

You will have to disable ECC in the bios or setup utility or it will hault on boot.

 

[Regs]

In second thought, don't bother.

It's not worth your troubles. Last thing you need is to buy RAM that might lead to instability issues or even worse getting a BSOD and ending up with a currupt hard drive. If you were stuck with it I would understand but the rule of thumb (as long as you still have a choice) is to avoid mixing memory at all.

 

[CrowDog]

so dont buy the ram? or dont mix the ram?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Don't buy, don't mix.

There was someone in FS/T selling 2 sets of 256 (each 2x128) for $50 each, try a search. Or eBay is usually $70-80, or $90 for new at newegg.

Or buy a new mobo

 

[Zepper]

Look in your BIOS setup for an option to Enable/Disable ECC support (you may have to switch to Manual RAM timing settings to see it). If the option is present, then your mobo supports ECC. So if the price is right and your mobo supports ECC, I would buy the ECC memory and pull the non-ECC memory as 512M is more than enough for most applications.
. With an AMD based system I could be confident in stating that if you mixed either ECC or non-ECC SDRAM or DDR, that it would work fine and the extra bits would be ignored. That is largely because almost no socket-A mobos support ECC. I am not sure that just disabling ECC support on an Intel mobo would do it for an RDRAM board - it's highly likely to work but I just can't be sure. An email to your mobo mfr. and/or system integrator should get to the facts.
.bh.

 

[stevty2889]

It should be fine, I have mixed ECC and non-ECC RDRAM on an intel 850 chipset. The ecc function is normaly disabled by default. Plus it's all samsung, so it's not like your mixing 2 differant brands. If for some strange reason, it were to cause you boot up issues, then I would go ahead and take out the old ram, but most likely you'll be fine, and going from 128mb to 512mb or 768mb will make a good differance.

 

[nageov3t]

the difference between 512MB and 640MB is small enough that it's not worth the risk of system instability. buy the ram but don't use it along side your old ram (or do, but just be on the lookout for weird issues, and remove the old ram if it becomes a problem)