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Comment by pdog | Hacker News Reader

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pdog·

No ECC support means it's totally useless for workstation workloads.

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With Ryzen, it's feasible to use ECC in a desktop/gaming PC too; you just need a motherboard that lists ECC support.

I'm running DDR4-3200 CL22 ECC overclocked to 3666 CL16 on an ASRock board with a 5800X.

Yeah, this is likely the implicit comparison GP was drawing.

Which ASRock board did you go with?

B550M Steel Legend... I think it's the only AM4 microATX board with ECC, 2.5G Ethernet, and dual USB3 headers.

Is there any advantage to using ECC for a gaming or desktop PC?

Given the choice, why would anyone ever want RAM that can flip bits undetected? It's basically a design flaw.

ECC RAM is more expensive - from a very quick search looks like 16gb ddr4 2666mhz would be about 30% higher price for ECC.

I've used non-ECC RAM for my entire life so far and bit flipping has never caused an obvious error for me, so if I'm going to pay more for ECC RAM I'd need a good reason to do so.

I think the problem with the bitflipping errors, is that you don't necessarily know that they've happened.

They are demonstrably broken though, and I agree it should be ECC everywhere

Presumably Xeon E-23xx is coming but you'll still be better off with Ryzen Pro 5xxx.

This wasn't ever going in workstations anyway. The part you want for that is Ice Lake.

Actually the part you want for workstations is Threadripper.

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