TR Forums

I believe I found the information I wanted on ECC motherboard support:
http://www.intel.com/support/motherboar ... ?wapkw=ecc

[EDIT]I just noticed that C204, in fact all of the C2xx series, are not on the list. The article was written in 2004, looking at the date at the bottom of the page. ARK is not exactly an easy knowledge base to navigate, it seems.

That page was updated just recently, only the original article was from 2004.

That said, while those platforms may support ECC DRAM that doesn't mean they'll take advantage of the ECC capabilities...AFAIK it just means that the memory itself will function properly.

You'd still need a Xeon CPU for it to work on the boards that do support ECC though as none of the i7, i5, etc CPUs support ECC.

I interpreted the last modified date as being simply a maintenance check by the server, similar to any webpage.

ECC support was added to 3rd generation Core i3 processors :
http://www.intel.com/support/processors ... cessors#10

I've gotten sticker shock at looking what ECC costs, so I'll be dropping it. The best I'm finding for prices is around $300 for a motherboard and $340 (registered) to $440 (unbuffered) for 32 GiB of RAM at maximum. To top it off I wasn't finding all the mobo features in Micro ATX format.

That leaves me settled on CPU, GPU, motherboard and RAM. That leaves CPU cooling and PSU.
While searching I came across this build : http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... 14&t=64808
The flexible heat-pipe (heat-tube?) cooler looks interesting, but thoughts of leaks or orientation issues leave me wondering. I'm assuming it's not feasible using one without the pump and fan running.

That's a self-contained water cooling unit tucked in there. The heatpipe and heatsink you see is the GPU. You definitely have to run the pump and you'll definitely need some airflow through the radiator. They tend to be pretty dense on self-contained systems so case airflow is unlikely to be enough to keep things cool without a dedicated fan.


I didn't know the newest Intel CPUs supported ECC (on some motherboards anyway)...that's a nice surprise!