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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Can we get certified ECC RAM on anything at consumer prices yet?

I decked out a home workstation 64GB ECC for $400 last year (paired with an AMD 5000 series CPU and Asus Pro WS X570-ACE motherboard which are both compatible). The motherboard specifically stated ECC compatibility.

Looks nice, checked it out on newegg. Unfortunately this looks problematic:

Each motherboard includes centralized management software with support for out-of-band management, so they're also an efficient and cost-effective option for IT administrators.

Maybe it is easily disabled. Probably more board than I need though. Integrated graphics is enough for me; I edit text files for a living.

It is a fancy board with an annoyingly high idle power consumption. But it meant official ECC support so I went with it.

Some Ryzen boards support ECC RAM, though the support is somewhat unofficial. I'm using 64 GB of ECC on an ASRock X570 Pro4 and it works fine. It's not the cheapest motherboard or the cheapest memory, but I'd say prices for both are in the consumer range rather than the clearly-for-business-only range.

Thanks, have you run any tests to confirm it is working? I’d be more comfortable with a guarantee from the manufacturer but confirmation an ok second choice.

Yes. I originally bought this board with a 3800X and 64 GB of inexpensive non-ECC RAM. That configuration worked fine. I later upgraded to a 5950X CPU, when I needed more CPU power and cores for some software I was writing. After upgrading, I occasionally got memory errors under very heavy load, with the same memory that had been fine with the slower CPU. I upgraded to ECC memory, and it fixed all the memory errors. The memory tested correctly as ECC in all the tools I tried, and also solved an actual stability problem I was having, so I trust it.

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