New
#1
Is ECC necessary for Lenovo Thinkserver TS140 RAM?
The old Compaq Presario that I was so excited about having fixed in my last post is dead. Turns out, my problem wasn't a bad power supply. The power supply WAS bad, but it wasn't the root cause. It turns out I had a defective motherboard and/or BIOS. Well, since the thing was a cheap throwaway computer when it was new, I can't really say it was defective, if anything 3 years is longer than expected.
Turns out, power wasn't regulated properly. We are in the second decade of the 21st century, and almost all computers, even the cheap ones, have a power supply that shuts itself off if anything pushes it too hard and a BIOS capable of regulating power. Not so with this machine. Not only that, but it also had a defective power port on the motherboard. Not the cord from the power supply, the port itself. And, the BIOS picked yesterday to stop regulating power properly.
Good news: The motherboard wasn't able to draw enough power out of the cheap Compaq power supply to kill itself. Bad news: It turned the power supply bad by always having it at or over peak capacity.
This perfect storm combined to send all 430W to the motherboard at once, you could literally see burn marks on it. The old power supply was affected by the same issue, but since it was only 250W it couldn't send enough juice to fry the motherboard in one go. All it did was kill things attached to the motherboard. What amazes me is that one of the two RAM sticks, the hard drive, and the pair of DVD/CD R/W drives survived and have been tested working with all data intact. Everything else was literally toast. If I ever doubted the existence of god...
So anyway, the new PCs I'm looking at are these:
- ASUS M (has ASUS reliability, but pricey with mediocre specs)
- Dell Inspiron 3000 (great price and even better specs, but as a Dell I know it would be a throwaway that might kill my hard drive, their reputation has nosedived in the past 5 years. And the crapware)
- Finally, what I think would be the best pick, is the Lenovo Thinkserver (if its designed for server level stress and uptime, its got to be reliable, right? Plus it has no hard drive and a mediocre dvd read only drive, which is good because I have my own and it slashes the price, and dat Xeon...). I know the power supply is crap, but the next item at my front door will be a nice Antec Platinum so no problem there. By far my favorite part is that since Lenovo presumably expects you to add hard drives to the empty bays, opening the case won't void the warranty.
The only problem with the Lenovo: 4GB RAM. I want 8GB. I've seen single Corsair 4GB DDR3 sticks for $50-60, so price isn't an issue. The issue is Lenovo's claimed requirement of "ECC RAM." Since ECC just means error correcting, this shouldn't be a problem, right? After all, unless I know nothing about this (not an unless, I actually know nothing about ECC), it should just lead to less bluescreens, which only happen once a year anyway, right?
Well, that's where I need help. All I know about ECC is what it stands for and my (probably wrong) extrapolation of what that means. The problem is that the prices I've seen on ECC are ridiculous, and they all seem to be designed for the Mac Pro. I have no intention of buying Apple, ever. And the ones that don't say "Mac Pro" have the same label as the ones that do. So my question is, is it possible to run a non-ECC stick with an ECC stick? Because I can afford an extra 4GB 1600Mhz DDR3 no problem. Also, if it does work, could mixing the two decrease longevity?
Last edited by seankurth; 29 Sep 2014 at 01:58.
Quote