It's possible get Registered ECC support on Intel X58 with Xeon?

Hello, I was bought cheap Registered ECC on eBay. My CPU Xeon X5672 supports these modules, but it doesn’t work with my motherboard Asus P6T7 WS SuperComputer. It’s seems that is some software limitations in BIOS. Does anybody have idea, how switch X58 to Intel 5500/5520?

  • RAM: Hynix 8 GB 2Rx4 PC3L-10600R HMT31GR7BFR4A H9 D2 2Gb chips, full specs on Hynix website.
  • Xeon 5600 Series datasheet, page 57

It’s too hard without BIOS source tree update, because ECC memory require different training routines as normal one. Contact ASUS, maybe they can help you, but porting MRC from another BIOS binary seems almost impossible to me.

If I understand you correctly, motherboards with native Xeon chipsets (like 5500, C200, C600, etc) have BIOS module (called MRC) which is responsible to ECC support? And this module cannot be exported from one board to another?

It might work; I have a Xeon L5520 in conjunction with 6x 2 GB PC3-8500R RAM running smoothly on a Supermicro X8SAX board, which is based on the X58 chipset.
I believe it rather depends on the CPU, since it brings along its memory controller. With the Xeon 55xx and 56xx series, registered ECC ram might work nicely, as in my case. I’d doubt it though for the Xeon 35xx series or the Core i7-9xx series.

HTH,
D2k

It’s not about chipsets, as they are all the same chip with slightly different firmware. MRC (Memory Reference Code) is a set of BIOS components from Intel, that a responsible for memory training and operation. They are product-specific and normally are available as source package for BIOS vendor to change and adjust for a specific board design, that’s why it would be really hard to port MRC components from ECC-capable BIOS of one board to ECC-unsupporting BIOS of another. Buying a right board is much easier by any means.