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by drewg123 3408 days ago
Yes, I still remember what a PITA it was to identify a motherboard that both supported ECC and allowed enabling it in the BIOS for my last AMD build (circa 2007). I still remember reading about boards that offered "ECC support", but had no way to enable it in the BIOS, change the scrubbing time, etc. And how relieved I was that whatever I wound up with did indeed have full ECC support.

Then again, buying Xeon boards with ECC support for desktop use has been "fun" as well, but for the opposite reason. I actually had to go with a USB sound card when I built my wife's e3 xeon setup.
2 comments
agapon 3407 days ago
Asus was the most forth-coming about that. If they mentioned ECC support on a motherboard's specifications page, then it supported ECC and it couldbe enabled, etc. If they didn't, then there was no ECC support. Other manufacturers were far less informative about that. Maybe because it was rare for them to support ECC. E.g. I think that none of Gigabyte AMD motherboards had ECC.
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jlgaddis 3408 days ago
There are plenty of SuperMicro desktop boards that include sound (and support ECC).
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drewg123 3408 days ago
Yes, I'm typing this from one (X10SRA) now. But there was some drawback to getting sound in ~2011. And even when I built this one, I wasn't really happy with the selection.

A poor selection and higher prices is a consequence of fragmenting the market and making workstations with ECC a fairly rare thing.

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