Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helf | Hacker News Reader

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I see this a lot but I really don’t think it was/is that simplistic.

It’s added complexity and cost for something that rarely would benefit most consumers. Now, you can argue that the complexity and cost is a nonissue on modern setups and I would probably agree.

But Intel has long had desktop grade hardware with ECC support. The 440GX chipset supported ECC and I ran a Dell GX1 SFF with 768MB of ECC PC100 for yeeeears with a 450 MHz P3 and later upgraded to 1.4ghz tualatin-256 via a slotket adapter.

The 440HX /socket 7/ chipset supported ECC. And that’s a Pentium 1 chipset.

The 440BX/GX and 450NX supported ECC and that’s with desktop pentium 2 and 3 chips.

The 820/820E/840 supported ECC with desktop celeron and pentium2/3 chips

845/845e/850/850e/860 pentium4 chipsets support ECC

875/e7205/e7221/e7230 did with desktop pentium 4 and pentium d chips

925/925xe/955x/975x did with desktop pentium 4/pentium d/core 2

It’s more sparse now that they moved to the IMC, granted. But Intel has long had multiple chipsets per generation with ECC support for desktop grade hardware.

Just because the chipset supported it doesn't mean the motherboard did, and there's little incentive for a motherboard company that makes server boards (OEM or under their own brand, or both) to sell ECC motherboards for the desktop consumer market, and integrators will not want to harm their "workstation" sales if "SOHO" systems are capable of ECC.

BTW, AMD's Ryzen CPUs and "Pro" APUs (APU = cpu with integrated graphics) will all do ECC, but not "officially", and not all motherboards have BIOS that supports it. You need to google around or just try it.

Right, but the motherboard for a lot of systems from that era were a nonissue. If the /chipset/ supported it like with the 440 line then most boards would handle it.

And, by your own suggestion, this isn’t a fault of Intel and more of OEMs sucking.

I mean, I guess Intel could have tried mandating it or something but meh

I miss the BX chipset. The last PC that wasn't a complete piece of shit I had was a 440BX chipset P3.

Me too. I would be running my 440BX today, but all the motherboards died from bad electrolytic capacitors that were endemic in that era.

Nothing you can't fix with Mouser and a soldering iron :)

Indeed, don't throw out old boards due to bad caps. I'm working on building a recapping skill so I can keep my old hardware alive as well. It's pretty cool to have the ability to take old non-working or marginal hardware, apply heat and modern capacitors to it, and make it stable again.

It's not even that complicated with hardware of that era.

Let's say you are afraid to destroy the through holes of the multilayer PCB by de-soldering the broken parts, or heating bordering parts up too much, whatever.

In most cases you can pull the caps just off from their pins, clean the pins, (even with paper tissue only) and simply solder the new ones to the old pins still anchored in the board.

Looks weird, but works :-)

Once I discovered "desoldering needles" I basically stopped being scared of desoldering through hole parts altogether. You can get a set cheaply on aliexpress or amazon or whatever.

You slide the needle over the component leg and then melt the solder. The needle slips over the component leg. Wait for the solder to cool and pull the needle out. Hey presto the leg is separated from the PCB pad. Also works great for cleaning solder out of a hole after traditional desoldering.

I loved my 440* chipset systems. I miss them, too, lol. My last one died due to a damn screw driver slip. sobs

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