woods@weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> I have a more-or-less no-name Pentium-Pro machine with 36-bit RAM and
> which supposedly has full ECC support (and it's enabled in the BIOS).

Does the manufacturer explain how to test whether the ECC is working
correctly?  For all we know there is a problem.

There was a case here in the SF Bay area a while back where some
manufacturer was shipping x86 boards with off-cpu caches.  The caches
never worked, so the manufacturer doctored up the bios to always turn
the cache off, no matter what the user's bios setting said.  From
looking at the bios, it just *looked* like the caches were active.  A
guy with a stopwatch finally caught them.  What is amazing was that it
went on for quite a long time.  Nobody bothered to check if their
extra cost board "with cache" actually ran faster when the cache was
on.

-wolfgang
-- 
       Wolfgang Rupprecht <wolfgang+gnus@dailyplanet.wsrcc.com>
		    http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Coming soon: GPS mapping tools for Open Systems. http://www.gnomad-mapping.com/