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From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Parity vs Non-Parity RAM
Date: 29 Jun 1997 12:29:44 -0700
Organization: Best Internet Communications, Inc. - 415 964 BEST
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <5p6d38$5uv$1@flea.best.net>
References: <5p552o$g9s@legends.cet.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:43715
:In article <5p552o$g9s@legends.cet.com>,
:Bruce Kingsland <brucek@pacifier.com> wrote:
:>Howdy...
:>
:>I acquired the FreeBSD book from Walnut Creek with 2.1.5 on a CD set. I'm about to build a box to install it in,
:>and while reading the book, ran across a discussion on the various mother boards to consider. The issue that I'm
:>currently concerned about has to do with the parity issue. The new mother boards seem to prefer non-parity ram
:>(which makes absoultely _no_ sense to me, $ aside), but also employ alot of "new" variations of RAM, such as EDO,
:>etc. Once upon a time I could keep with these variations, but not anymore. Could someone please bring me up to
:>speed on the stability of FreeBSD in a non-parity system, and how these other RAM solutions fit into the picture?
:>
:>I hope this is not too far off topic for this group....
:>
:>Thanx!
:>-bk
Generally speaking, pentium's and pentium II's will NOT do ECC
(error correction) with parity SIMMs, but they will do simple
parity.
EDO memory is 15% faster for the same rating, but getting
parity EDO memory is more difficult then getting normal
parity memory.
We don't even consider non-ECC configurations any more. All
of our boxes run PPro 200's with 60ns normal (non-EDO) parity
SIMM memory, with ECC turned on in the BIOS. There is no other
way to guarentee reliability, especially with the huge number
of bad SIMMs being sold these days.
The Pentium II's run at a higher clock rate then the pentium
pro's, but their caches are external and run at half the speed.
Personally, I think the Pentium Pro's are faster and more reliable
cpu's with their full-frequency on-chip secondary cache, and the
PPro's will do ECC while the Pentium and Pentium II's will not.
-Matt