ECC Memory issues....question..

[mobogasm]

Hi, I have a Tyan Tiger MPX with dual athlon 1900+'s and 2x256MB Reg ECC PC2100 DDR from Crucial. I have been having some random lockin up issues and a infrequent IRQ_NOT_LESSTHAN_OR_EQUAL_TO error. I have three options in bios fro ECC, one is error checking, two is error checking and correcting and three is error checking correcting and something else. When I turn on error checking everything seems fine but as soon as I turn on checking and correcting my system slows down drastically once in windows. I'm using XP. I'm assuming I have some defective memory. I never had ECC on before the other day because I had just forgot to turn it on but since I started having some lockups I figured I'd turn it on after I noticed that. I have ran memtest86 with ecc on for 48 hours straight with no errors. Any ideas?? Thanks.

 

[jackschmittusa]

There is a performance overhead for checking and correcting. If it slows down a lot, it is probably doing a lot of correcting.

 

[pm]

Turning on ECC checking and correcting for me results in about a 2% performance penalty on my Asus P4B266 motherboard.

If ECC errors are being generated in Windows XP, I believe it writes the detection of the error to the System Log under the Event Viewer under the Administrative Tools. Even if ECC events aren't happening, then the event viewer is a good place to check for issues.

 

[bozo1]

I leave ECC turned off.

 

[sharkeeper]

Try MT86 with ECC OFF.

If ECC is catching a lot of errors, you may need to replace your RAM. ECC is really meant to catch occasional bit flip errata caused by either cosmic radiation or naturally ocurring Radium present in the chips themselves!

ECC Whitepaper

-DAK-