Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Bill Broadley]

My desktop at home is a MSI Neo4, I think it's the platinum.

2 4 channel SATA controllers.
2 GigE
16x PCI-e, 1x PCI-e
10 USB 2.0
2 IEEE 1394 ports

At:
http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=492

It says:
• Supports dual channel DDR 266/333/400, using four 184-pin DDR DIMMs.
• Supports a maximum memory size up to 4GB without ECC.
• Supports 2.5v DDR SDRAM DIMM.

I downloaded the manual and acrobat says not a single mention of ECC.

So what does "without" mean?  That only 4GB is not allowed with ECC?
Or that ECC doesn't work at all.  Or that it works but you don't
actually get the error correction?

I've seen wording in amd64 manuals (of the older generation) that
I read to mean that the dimms would work (the CPU would be able
to read/write to memory) but not provide ECC.  

Things seemed really murky for the athlon, athlon XP, and earlier
AMD64 motherboards I looked at.  I was glad that the opteron was
rather clear on this.  From Mark's post it looks like several of
the motherboard vendors are clarifying this for AMD64 boards
as well.



-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis