First time PC builder

[mdRZNbm]

Hi guys, 

 

please pardon me noob post

 

i have a hand-me-down aliexpress machinist mr9A pro x99 motherboard and a Xeon E5-2690 v4 cpu from a buddy, who shared that it can only work with DDR4 ECC ram, but did admit that he never got around trying non-ecc ram.

 

after days of research with not much luck as there is not much information on aliexpress motherboards, will using non-ecc ddr4 ram cause any problems or worst, damage to the motherboard and cpu?
 

 

[RONOTHAN##]

20 minutes ago, mdRZNbm said:

will using non-ecc ddr4 ram cause any problems or worst, damage to the motherboard and cpu?

Cause problems maybe, cause damage no. These Chinese "X99" boards (actually C612 most of the time) have a lot of weird BIOS behaviors a lot of times because they have to reverse engineer the BIOS or their boards. While the CPU and board themselves will work with unbuffered non-ECC, whether the board vendor actually put effort into getting non-ECC to work properly is another story. 

 

Granted, I'd usually expect the other way around, where the board technically supports ECC though it might cause issues. If you have non-ECC memory hanging around, I'd go ahead and give it a shot, though since registered DDR4 ECC is usually cheaper than unbuffered DIMMs on sites like eBay I'd probably just go for that if you were planning on buying new RAM for it anyway if you know it will work from your friend. If he was running it with unbuffered ECC for whatever reason (it's generally the most expensive DDR4 per GB), then it should work with unbuffered non-ECC DIMMs just fine and you should buy those instead, not taking the gamble with registered DIMMs.  

[mdRZNbm]

38 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Cause problems maybe, cause damage no. These Chinese "X99" boards (actually C612 most of the time) have a lot of weird BIOS behaviors a lot of times because they have to reverse engineer the BIOS or their boards. While the CPU and board themselves will work with unbuffered non-ECC, whether the board vendor actually put effort into getting non-ECC to work properly is another story. 

 

Granted, I'd usually expect the other way around, where the board technically supports ECC though it might cause issues. If you have non-ECC memory hanging around, I'd go ahead and give it a shot, though since registered DDR4 ECC is usually cheaper than unbuffered DIMMs on sites like eBay I'd probably just go for that if you were planning on buying new RAM for it anyway if you know it will work from your friend. If he was running it with unbuffered ECC for whatever reason (it's generally the most expensive DDR4 per GB), then it should work with unbuffered non-ECC DIMMs just fine and you should buy those instead, not taking the gamble with registered DIMMs.  

thank you so much for the clear explanation. this helps a lot. especially when it involves items from "exotic" brands.