Noob mem questions re: ECC/reg vs. not

I am building a dual xeon machine w/ 2.4/512/533 Xeons and am trying to figure out which board toget and which mem.

Right now I have already two 512MB Samsung PC2700 ECC Registered modules.

I can either sell them, and get an ASUS PC-DL mobo, which supports up to DDR333 RAM, or keep my mem and get the 7505 chipset which supports the standard 266 ECC RAM.

I will be using the machine for
1. Games (I can amdit it!)
2. Photoshop/Fireworks/Flash apps
3. Web and FTP hosting (my own stuff)

My Dilemma:
The mobo that supports slower ECC also has 64 bit slots (for my SCSI U160 RAID controller which run 6 SCSI drives in 2 arrays).
The mobo with faster RAM only has 33MHz PCI slots.

Which would you guys prefer for my apps?
Take the slower mem with the PCI-X slots for the faster RAID?
Or take the mobo with the faster RAM and slower RAID?

Thanks in advance as usual!

This is purely my personal opinion...

I've heard good things about the Asus PC-DL and it's one of the better overclocking boards available too. If I were to build a dual Xeon rig, that's the mobo for me.

Because I'd build an overclocked system, then I'd want non-ECC faster RAM. But, you do already have the PC2700 ECC RAM. Are you sure that can't be used in the PC-DL?

Do you have the SCSI drives to go along with the SCSI controller card? If so, then that might influence the decision too.

batboy said:

This is purely my personal opinion...

I've heard good things about the Asus PC-DL and it's one of the better overclocking boards available too. If I were to build a dual Xeon rig, that's the mobo for me.

Because I'd build an overclocked system, then I'd want non-ECC faster RAM. But, you do already have the PC2700 ECC RAM. Are you sure that can't be used in the PC-DL?

Do you have the SCSI drives to go along with the SCSI controller card? If so, then that might influence the decision too.

Click to expand...

Ya, the guys at 2CPU said that registered RAM is no good. It will take ECC, but not registered ECC (I always thought ECC HAD to be registered, but apparently not).

I just ordered the ASUS PP-DLW which has the PCI-X and ECC266 RAM, we'll see how it works out. I'm hoping I can change the multiplier in the BIOS, according to the manual, it can be changed, but I'll know further when it comes in...