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Making ECC ram from old sticks.

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First post, by Sphere478

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I have some nice pc133 sticks that have pads for ecc 9th bit but ram sticks like that seem to be super rare.

My motherboard supports ECC, in fact, I think all of my motherboards do but they usually seem to be picky about the register/buffer chips so why don’t I make some? I have two 256mb sticks that are identical, and a 128mb stick with the same chips that I can harvest from and I can just order another 256mb stick and end up with 768mb of ECC ram why not🤷‍♂️

So… how do I do that though? Is it simple as soldering the ram chip on? Or what other resistors, etc must I add?

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Sphere's PCB projects.
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Reply 2 of 4, by Sphere478

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appleiiguy wrote on 2021-12-25, 16:13:

need to reprogram the SPD module.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_presence_detect

Shouldn’t be a big deal. I think I have techpowerup spd tool somewhere.

Is that it? Solder in chip, mess with spd?

Sphere's PCB projects.
-
Sphere’s socket 5/7 cpu collection.
-
SUCCESSFUL K6-2+ to K6-3+ Full Cache Enable Mod
-
Tyan S1564S to S1564D single to dual processor conversion (also s1563 and s1562)

Reply 4 of 4, by snufkin

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Don't really know, but may not have to mess with the SPD. That trick to make registered SDRAM work on non-registered boards doesn't change the SPD, so even though the RAM still reports itself and registered, the motherboard doesn't care. Same thing may work with ECC. Look like the termination resistors are missing, couple of 8 pin surface mount resistor packs. You could compare how the other chips connect to the pins and then make sure that the ECC chips connect in the same way.
Watch out for some motherboards claiming to support ECC, but not actually using it (my KA7 being a good example, I think it just means 'supports' as in doesn't actually cause it to fail).

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