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ECC memory... any thoughts?

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Any way to know if one is "covered" by ECC at any given moment?

I mean, I still haven't been able to figure out if it is enabled all the time in this, even though I have no platform support and no way to monitor it from within the OS. And P8C WS being only a semi-serious workstation board, has no logging facility for ECC errors.

It would be cool if one could build a mini-ITX hackintosh with i3 and put ECC memory into it.

To answer your question, I have two 4 GB sticks of Kingston 1333 MHz ECC DDR3, of a type recommended by Asus in their HCL.

I am in a kind of limbo.

There are two ways to go.

I could either go for a Supermicro board and buy one or two Xeons. One IB Xeon and choose parts to imitate the trashcan Mac Pro. Or one or two older Xeons and a board with a Tylersburg chipset. But so far nobody has verified that it would be worth the trouble, how hard would it be and what is ultimately possible.

Or I could forget about ECC and Xeons entirely and go for an ordinary i3, i5 or i7 machine, a Gigabyte board and other supported parts, have sleep and speedstep and all joys of a supported platform.

This machine is ok. Except that this won't sleep, speedstep has never been perfect and there is a problem with a lockup or freeze maybe twice a week. I have a habit of keeping this always on and that's about the uptime I get.

Edit:

As far as I know, the ECC support and error logging are done by AppleTyMCEDriver.kext and it requires something that I have no idea about. I assume one needs a certain smbios and then X86PlatformPlugin. And if one has a supported platform, then one can load the AppleTyMCEDriver. On unsupported platforms, as far as I know, it causes a KP immediately. I have no idea if one could fix that by editing the kext to make it see one's platform as supported.

I also have no idea if those who have built a Hack Pro around a Supermicro board with a Tylersburg chipset have had ECC memory recognized by the OS. That is, AppleTyMCEDriver has loaded successfully. Nobody has answered the question and I am not sure if they care. The other reason to build a dual Xeon on a Supermicro board is to have loads of cores.

I, personally, am happy with 4 cores and 8 threads. My SB Mac Mini with discrete GeForce and a 2 core 4 thread 2.5 GHz i5 is not fast enough for my study and virtualization projects. I can't be sure about a 4 core 4 thread middle ground.

Edit 2:

It very much sounds like everyone who has attempted to replicate any real life Mac Pro, including ECC, has gone down fighting and has never been heard about since. The limitations and surprises are downright scary, and going through every combination of parts and settings is a normal way to solve problems. I would recommend astronomy or biochemistry instead. They sound far easier and more logical. Supermicro dual Xeons are somewhere in the domain of voodoo.
 
I just put together a file server with the intel DBS1200KPR and 8GB of ECC RAM. System information reports ECC: Enabled

10.9 and Server.app installed without a flaw, everything works.

It's a mITX server motherboard and it doesn't have any bells n whistles.
Socket 1155
C206 chipset
The board has NO audio.
It has 1 PCIe x16 v2 or v3 depending on the CPU
Supports 16gb ECC unbuffered RAM total.
4 USB 2.0 ports on the back, 2 headers on the board. NO USB 3

2 Intel Gb Ethernet ports, 82574L & 82574LM both work with the AppleIntelE1000e.kext.

The CPU throttles and does the turbo thing, I'm able to watch the speed jump as the load increases using Fake FMC HWMonitor. I only see it at x16 and x32, not sure if it should be using any multipliers in between or not.
System information reports the SATA as Intel Series 6 Chipset. Even though the CPU is Series 7 I didn't need to add the patch for mixed systems.
You need a Xeon with integrated graphics the board has a dvi-i port, but it only supports 1024x768. Well, it might support more, but since i'm using it only as a file server at the moment I haven't really looked into it. Make sure the Xeon has a 5 at the end. The 1225 and 1265 support HD P4000 graphics.

If you're going to use a E3-12xxV2 IT MUST BE A DBS1200KPR, it has to have the R on the end or it won't work with an Ivy Bridge CPU's.

It's out of production and starting to get scarce. I got mine from Amazon. That and eBay are the only 2 places I've seen them at reasonable prices, just over $200.

All the documentation that came with the board list it as a DBS1200KP, in the footnotes it mentions the DBS1200KPR.
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/s1200kp/sb/g38894002_s1200kp_tps_r1_1.pdf


Intel DBS1200KPR
Xeon E3-1225V2
Kingston KVR16E11/8I - 8GB
Highpoint Rocketraid RR2720SGL
6 Seagate ST4000VN000
2 Seagate ST2000DM001
 
crashoblong said:
I just put together a file server with the intel DBS1200KPR and 8GB of ECC RAM. System information reports ECC: Enabled
Click to expand...

As far as I know, System information does that when you have a MacPro smbios. I think it has nothing to do with the actual state of the ECC functionality in the system.

What would really settle the question is if you can somewhere see ECC working. I mean, if you see somewhere, in the logs or in BIOS, reports of corrected single bit errors.

Which smbios are you using? Do you have AppleTyMCEDriver loaded?
 
Im using an old GA X58a Ud3r with a xeon w3680 and just upgraded to 24Gig of ECC mems.
I created a linux install Usb stick to run memtest from it. It recognized the ECC mems just fine.
"Chipset : NHM IMC (ECC : Detect / Correct) Scrub+"

Overclocked my memory dimms really bad and checked kernel log in OSX while benchmarking:
"AppleTyMCEDriver ReadCorrectable : Detected 1 errors on channel 1 dimm 0 package 0"
 
mcbeth303 said:
just upgraded to 24Gig of ECC mems.
Click to expand...

Hi mcbeth303, what make/model of ECC mems did you use? I've had a GA X58a Ud3r for several years and I just bought a W3680 on eBay for $AU 155 and I'd also like to run it with ECC mems. Are there any other ECC mems that would work with this combo?
 
I bought Hynix HMT351U7BFR8A-H9T0
Got a good deal on those back then. They still work fine.
 
That's fantastic mcbeth303. I sort of gave up expecting a reply. I was going to experiment with various ECC memory so I took a stab in the dark and bought 12gb of Hynix HMT125R7BFR8C-H9 ecc registered memory for $25. I was about to buy some various rank ecc unbuffered memory. I'm now going to try to buy the same as yours. I wonder if I buy something similar, say from Kingston, do you think it might work? Was there any particular reason you chose these mems? rank, low voltage, unbuffered?
 
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