Strangely, I must have 'rev1' of the box, because my 'lid' on my ANS-9010 is a solid piece of metal. There's no holes in it at all. What would be great is a fan for these things. They get kind of warm, so I left my cover off.

Serra,

Nice review. I just have one comment. I'd research more before you take my word for this...I tried to look this up quickly before work, but i couldn't get all the info to verify this for myself. Based on what you can research about ECC, your review might be inaccurate as to the ECC calculations being performed on the RAM stick itself .

If i'm not mistaken, ECC is 72 bit RAM instead of 64 bit.

- For non-ECC RAM, 64 bits of data are sent via the RAM to the motherboard.
- For ECC RAM, 72-bits of data are sent via the RAM to the motherboard. The 8 additional bits are handed off to the memory controller, where the ECC checking is performed.

If you think about it, most ram are even number of chips(2,4,8,etc). You'll see an extra 'missing' chip slot on alot of RAM. The missing slot is because the PCB is made to support anything. The ram manufacturer solders on the number of chips and size for the amount of ram they want, and if the stick is intended to be ECC, the extra chip is added. In my example above, the chips would have been 8 bit, with the 9th chip being identical to the rest providing the 72 bits of data.

Several people have noted using ECC and non-ECC RAM(with the ECC feature enabled) and could not find a performance difference. The answer is simple. The board has to perform the ECC calculation regardless of the type of RAM used. The real difference is that ECC ram has 1/9th more RAM on the stick, but is not user available space because those memory locations are designated for ECC checking. So really, if you buy a 2GB stick of ECC RAM, it's technically 2.25GB, but your available space is 2GB.

I believe(of course, i'm not the designer so I have no information to prove this) that the ANS-9010 detects the total quantity of RAM available(this includes the ECC space, so 2x2GB ECC sticks would really be detected as 4.5GB). But since the box uses ECC we'd still see the 4GB.

This could have changed. I looked at pictures on newegg and stuff, and they were showing pictures of ECC ram with only 8 chips, but it could be they were just using a canned picture for all memory made by the same manufacturer. I'm not sure if its changed, that's why I think you should research it further.

Also, if what I said above is true, then the implications for using the pseudo ECC feature are more pronounced. This means that any RAM request would actually be 2 requests. 1 for the data, and a separate request for the additional ECC data. This would effectively mean that the RAM's theoretical max is 1/2 of the speeds. I'm sure they aren't using RAM at the DDR2-400 speed, probably more like DDR-200 or something along those lines. I believe the Gigabyte I-RAM was DDR-83 or DDR-100... It was underclocked whatever it was.