MSI AM5 motherboards and ECC support

[azrael]

Of the "Big 4" motherboard manufacturers (ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI) only MSI seems to officially not support ECC on their AMD motherboards. Look at any board's specification and it states "supports non-ECC, unbuffered" memory. Seems like it's cut'n'dried. However, a couple of days ago I looked at the BIOS/UEFI guide for the new 800 series AM5 boards. In there, I found the following statement: ECC - Enables or disables DRAM ECC. It seems to be a "catch all" guide with no specific model mentioned. Somewhat intrigued I downloaded the latest BIOS for a couple of motherboards and opened them using AMIBCP. In there are several strings reading like this:

DDR ECC Configuration
ECC
Use this option to enable / disable ECC. Auto will set ECC to enable.

and

Disable Memory Error Injection

and

Clear/Zero out Dram range [DramScrubBaseAddr: DramScrubLimitAddr]. When this option is disabled, Memory is not cleared after training. ECC Dimms have memory clear enabled always. Non-ECC DIMMs can choose to disable/enable using this option.
Default = Memclear disabled

and

DRAM Read Link ECC Enable
Use this option to enable / disable Link ECC on DRAM Read. Auto will set ECC to enable.

and

DRAM Write Link ECC Enable
Use this option to enable / disable Link ECC on DRAM Write. Auto will set ECC to enable.

If anything, this suggests that MSI might have even more ECC-related options that other manufacturers. The problem is to get this verified. Like I said, MSI is keeping mum about it. I bet a lot of you are using MSI motherboards, but does one of you also have access to at least one stick of ECC DDR5 memory to check if these settings truly appear in the BIOS/UEFI? BTW, I'm not talking about On-die ECC. That's not real ECC and is mandatory for DDR5 (there is no DDR5 module without it).

 

[ir_cow]

Which chipset are you look at X670 or X870?

 

[Ruru]

AFAIK, AMD itself supports ECC with the consumer CPUs, my guess is that some motherboards don't maybe officially support it, but it can still work without an official support from them.

 

[azrael]

Which chipset are you look at X670 or X870?

Mainly X670(E), but also X870(E). For the sake of "science" I've also checked som B650 and B850 BIOSes and they have the same strings.

AFAIK, AMD itself supports ECC with the consumer CPUs, my guess is that some motherboards don't maybe officially support it, but it can still work without an official support from them.

I know that, but all the other big motherboard manufacturers explicitly state ECC support. Gigabyte only as of the 800 series, though. AFAIK, to actually support ECC on a motherboard, it's not enough to have a CPU and a chipset supporting it, but also extra traces for the parity memory lanes. This is why you can't just buy one on the off chance it works.

 

[Ruru]

Mainly X670(E), but also X870(E). For the sake of "science" I've also checked som B650 and B850 BIOSes and they have the same strings.

I know that, but all the other big motherboard manufacturers explicitly state ECC support. Gigabyte only as of the 800 series, though. AFAIK, to actually support ECC on a motherboard, it's not enough to have a CPU and a chipset supporting it, but also extra traces for the parity memory lanes. This is why you can't just buy one on the off chance it works.

That's new for me, though ECC modules are 72-bit, but I never realized that.

 

[azrael]

That's new for me, though ECC modules are 72-bit, but I never realized that.

As of DDR5 the modules are actually 80 bit wide, because the 64 bit bus has been split into 2x 32 bit, each of which gets 8 parity bits.

 

[azrael]

Perhaps @W1zzard has the necessary components to do a quick check?