Re: AMD 64 Rumours!

From: Anton Ertl (anton_at_mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at)
Date: 05/25/04 

Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 09:09:13 GMT

General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> writes:
>On Mon, 24 May 2004 14:09:37 -0700, Fountain of knowledge wrote:
>> Also, can anyone recommend a specific chip to buy? Price is not the
>> first consideration, i want something that can be upgraded in the
>> future and won't leave me stuck.

Upgradable motherboards are a myth (well, mostly). You will have a
better chance with a Socket-939 motherboard, but I generally recommend
waiting for boards to mature for half a year or so before buying them
(so even if you can buy a 939-board in a month, I would not recommend
it).

Also, looking at the prices of mature motherboards, why not replace
the board together with the CPU when upgrading? You typically also
get a bunch of nice new features.

> However the 939 parts support more RAM than the 754s, they
>will also support ECC memory which the 754s don't (I'm not absolutely sure
>about this but it's hard to imagine that AMD woudl put out a part like
>this that doesn't support ECC).

The Socket-754 Athlon 64 supports ECC (read the data ***). I have
ECC RAM working with it, and the BIOS of my motherboard offers various
settings for ECC. Of course, since I have no half-broken ECC RAM,
it's hard to be sure that ECC works, but that's always the problem
with ECC. BTW, any idea if corrected errors show up in
/var/log/messages or anywhere else in Linux?

I don't know if the Socket-939 Athlon 64s support ECC. One reason why
it might not is that AMD marketing might think that those people who
want ECC are willing to pay for it, and that they should pay AMD for
it too, by buying Opterons. So check out the data sheets and the
manual or BIOS of your prospective motherboard.

- anton 

-- 
M. Anton Ertl                    Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
Quantcast