Motherboards & ECC-memory support

I have been a pretty happy Asus client with my previous systems -- my last system used a P5WDH board w/an E6700 conroe chip, and the one before that used an A8N32-SLI board w/an FX-60. I need to replace the A8N32 system, and the new mobos with the Intel P35 chipset look very nice. But I'd also like to start building systems that use ECC memory. Unfortunately, most of the high-performance consumer boards with new chipsets that I've checked at the Asus web pages *don't* have ECC support. In fact, I'm not even sure the P35 chipset supports ECC at all. (In fact, I'm not even sure that DDR-3 supports ECC at all. I'm not that level of hardware wizard.)

What I'd like is a motherboard that supports pretty aggressive/hot CPUs and memory (I will watercool the thing, so I can handle max heat with no problems), yet supports ECC memory, plus fat PCI-express bandwidth for a high-end graphics card. I only need a single ethernet port. I don't need 6-channel sound; I use an outboard box for sound. Plenty of USB & SATA is good. The system will mostly run linux. I don't overclock or spend my time tweaking my hardware; I buy fast hardware, set it up, then spend my time using it. So I don't care if the system has millions of BIOS options for frobbing various clock multipliers & voltage levels -- as long as it is fast out of the box.

I note that the older generation of Asus cards (e.g., the P5WDH mobo) *do* handle ECC. It's the new boards that don't.

By the way, if you're wondering why I care about ECC, there's a standard short summary: ECC is only as important as your data. Memory errors are known to occur modern memory systems. The studies I've seen show rates such as 1 failure per year per Gb at sea level, going up to 1 failure every 15 hours per Gb if you're five miles up (e.g., if you fly to Japan and use your notebook computer, you will get a fault). These numbers are 2004 numbers. As feature size decreases, voltage decreases, and clock rates increase, the numbers get worse, and the curves I've seen in the papers I've checked are exponentials. So: I take ECC seriously.

The essential problem is that data integrity is irrelevant to overclocking gamers, so the kind of full-featured, fast boards that I've mentioned above don't tend to be designed with data integrity in mind. (To make a snarky comparison, it strikes me as being similar to the market dynamics that drive development of programs such as Microsoft Word: features sell, not robustness.)

So I'm back to wondering what the right mobo is for the design point I've described.

-EKH