audendum to sis 530 identity inquiry

[shidenkai]

SIS wikipedia indentified this board as sis 530/5595 (sindbad) socket 7 66-124Mhz bus 2-8mB shared AGP sis 6326 3D

Start up screen bios string AMI 1-10-200s 52-0110-001437-00101111-071595-000000-001_v90_5670-h

Using this, hardware archivist Edwin indicated this board was a PC Chips (hsin tech) m599lmr.

A quantity of data including the manual can be found at http://virtual-concepts.net/drivers/pcchips/m599lmr/

Not all ram compatibility is listed. Does anyone know if ecc ram will work with this board or if pc 133 ecc or non ecc will. I have tried pc 100 ecc registared which supposedly for servers only. This didn't work, but I don't know if the card was bad.

Also could anybody recommend a reference detailing the necessities of ecc/non ecc, registared or not. Most of the information I have found is conflicting.

[Denniss]

SIS chipsets do not work with registered ram, ECC might be ignored (memory just working like without ECC) or might not work, too.

[cp]

ECC will just be ignored on chipsets that doesn't support it as long as they support the size and organisation of the memory module itself.

[KachiWachi]

cp sez -

ECC will just be ignored on chipsets that doesn't support it as long as they support the size and organisation of the memory module itself.

Are you sure about this?

Does this apply to *all* chipsets?

[cp]

http://www.crucial.com/kb/answer.aspx?qid=3692

there is nothing special about ECC modules, just the ECC circuit. like the link says ECC will be disabled if you put non-ECC modules in an ECC system. On the other hand ECC on modules will be ignored if you put it in a system that is not ECC capable.

take a look at the specs:
http://cpcng.hytherion.com/datasheets/I ... nb_001.pdf

ECC modules are exactly the same as non-ECC modules, except for the ECC memory that holds the data used to correct 1bit errors and detect upto 4bit errors. as you can see that ECC memory is just connected in parallel to the normal memory. non-ECC modules do not have this additional memory.

[KachiWachi]

OK cp.

The only reason I asked was because I ran into this a while ago...and something didn't work.

I forget the details at the moment...but the RAM in question was ECC.

Thanks.

[shidenkai]

Futher question for this board
The manual posted on virtual-concepts.net does not identify if there is a disabling jumper for the onboard agp.
I am attempting to use a 32mB ATI pci radeon video card with this machine.
Device manager will not allow disabling the onboard card for a driver update.
Is one of the unidentified jumpers for video.

[Denniss]

AFAIR it'snot possible to disable the integrated VGA. There should be an option to set PCI as primary VGA and you should also be able to reduce shared memory (for integrated VGA) to a Minimum.

Once the PCI Radeon is fully working then deinstall the OnBoard VGA drivers.

[cp]

i tested a few boards with REGISTERED ECC ram today: an intel 440BX and 810E board worked fine while a VIA Apollo Pro+ board failed. the intel chipsets ignore the ECC feature treating the memory like every other SDRAM module out there. i'm sure that the VIA board would work, too. it's just a bios thing.

[edwin]

440BX boards seem to be hit and miss using ECC sticks. Some will take it, some won't boot at all, some will warn they disabled the ECC. Weird...