ECC RAM (v. how do I know it's working?)

[Stereodude]

So, I have 32gB of Crucial DDR3-1600L RAM (4 x 8gB EUDIMMs), an Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 processor, and a motherboard with an Intel C224 chipset (ASRock Rack E3C224). They all support ECC, so how do I tell if it's actually working? The SPD for the memory proudly says it's ECC. I don't see any option to enable or disable ECC in the BIOS or any sort of message in the BIOS that ECC is enabled or working. I can see the SPD data from the RAM, but that's it. Memtest86+ 5.01 doesn't tell me either. It shows the SPD data for all 4 sticks, but again nothing else.

 

[Handruin]

What about trying an Ubuntu Live CD to boot from and check: dmidecode -t memory? This is what mine shows...not sure if you will see a value for Error Correction Type.

# dmidecode 2.12
# SMBIOS entry point at 0x000f04c0
SMBIOS 2.7 present.

Handle 0x0023, DMI type 16, 23 bytes
Physical Memory Array
        Location: System Board Or Motherboard
        Use: System Memory
        [B]Error Correction Type: Single-bit ECC[/B]
        Maximum Capacity: 32 GB
        Error Information Handle: Not Provided
        Number Of Devices: 4

 

[Handruin]

You could also try WMI query using powershell.

Open a powershell window and paste in this command. You should get an int value returned and can map it to the key below. On my main desktop I got a value of 3 which is correct for my system. I'm curious what you might get on yours.

Get-WmiObject Win32_PhysicalMemoryArray | Select-Object MemoryErrorCorrection

Reserved (0)
Other (1)
Unknown (2)
None (3)
Parity (4)
Single-bit ECC (5)
Multi-bit ECC (6)
CRC (7)

 

[ddrueding]

Works correctly for me as well. (3)

 

[mubs]

I get a 3 too, which is correct for my system.

 

[Stereodude]

Okay, I'll look into those later. Right now the "system" has no drives connected to it. It's just a motherboard w/ RAM and a CPU sitting outside a case aka ddrueding style. I know I can use a LiveUSB instead. I'll do that after I'm happy with the length and duration of my memtest86+ test.

Edit: As an aside, I was surprised how small the Intel retail HSF is for an 80W server/workstation CPU.

 

[Stereodude]

You could also try WMI query using powershell.

Open a powershell window and paste in this command. You should get an int value returned and can map it to the key below. On my main desktop I got a value of 3 which is correct for my system. I'm curious what you might get on yours.

Get-WmiObject Win32_PhysicalMemoryArray | Select-Object MemoryErrorCorrection

Reserved (0)
Other (1)
Unknown (2)
None (3)
Parity (4)
Single-bit ECC (5)
Multi-bit ECC (6)
CRC (7)

I got 5 on the system, so I guess it's all working.

 

[Stereodude]

I tried this today on my Supermicro X9SRA with my v1 E5 Xeon running Windows 10 Pro and got 6. :scratch: I was expecting 5.

Windows 10 Pro on the v3 E3 Xeon system in the ASRock Rack board returns a 5, like it did under Windows 7 Pro.