Hi, I have a Matsonic MS8308EP board & Crucial Scan says that it only accepts Non-ECC RAM. However I am currently running my PC with ECC RAM installed which WinXP correctly recognises as 2 x 512 sticks. Since it is obviously working should I leave well alone or will it damage my PC using these sticks. The sticks of RAM currently installed are : 2 x 512Mb - Samsung PC133R ECC SDRAM M390S6450AT1-C75 I am thouroughly confused & bewildered by the intricacies of memory & would appreciate any help you can offer. Regards, CDH CDH

I would leave well enough alone. You can't fix whats not broken. ECC has an extra chip for error correction. If your system....didn't like it, most likely it would not even boot up.

Do you get random errors? Worldlibrary is probably correct but I can see where the EEC RAM could possibly cause problems. Check the BIOS settings to see if the RAM is running at the correct speed. Why are you running EEC RAM anyway? Recycled from a different machine?

I have found the only place that fully and accurately advises which memory options a motherboard supports is the manual for that motherboard. Good Luck - Keep us posted.

First of all thanks for the quick responses, your advice is appreciated. worldlibrary wrote: 'If your system....didn't like it, most likely it would not even boot up.' Yeah that's what I was thinking but I wasn't sure. othehill wrote: 'Why are you running EEC RAM anyway? Recycled from a different machine?' Picked them up at a boot sale so I thought i'd test them on an old board. Didn't expect them to work really but they appear to work fine. Mike Newcomb wrote: 'I have found the only place that fully and accurately advises which memory options a motherboard supports is the manual for that motherboard.' Agreed but the manual doesn't specify and the Matsonic website appears to have disapeared into web limbo. Anyway I've been running it now for a few hours and all seems well. If it blows up I'll be back and let you know, or perhaps not depending on size of fire :) Once again thanks for the advice Regards CDH CDH

I think when the specs say it takes non-ECC ram it just means it doesn't require ECC ram. That is, if you use ECC ram its error correcting capabilites are ignored. If a MOBO does need ECC ram and you use non-ECC that's when you start getting error messages. That was the case with the old SIMM ram that had parity and non-parity versions. And there was no problem in using either when the MOBO didn't require parity. I think ECC is more sophisticated than parity checking but the idea is the same.

I couldn't find a manufactuer's site either. Did determine that board is a Socket A (462) AMD with a SIS 730 series combo chipset (intergrated graphics). The SIS site wasn't much help either.