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justinclift

> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips

They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well.

My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems.

Random examples:

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/... (8th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/... (9th gen i3)

• https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/... (10th gen i3)

Looking over random i3 pages from 11th gen onwards though, I'm not even seeing ECC mentioned on the pages at all.

It's not a "yes/no" item like on the older generation ones pages, it's completely absent (from the ones I just checked). :(

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It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.

You can still see it even in 13th generation CPUs: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232105/...

But as you can see here, this is an embedded variant; you're not going to find it at Amazon, as it's probably only sold directly to manufacturers.

I own one if these i3s from 6th gen. Bought at retail. Nothing special.

> they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips

That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC. That's what I did anyway. :)

>These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC.

As I pointed out before, you can't do that for a media server. Transcoding is necessary for many (most?) users.

>That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

That's a distinction without a difference: those other non-Xeon chips aren't useful if you can't even buy them because you're not an OEM.

They look pretty easily available to me, or are you going to exclude Ebay now as well?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305342386279 (note: I don't know the seller)

Yes, I'd exclude anything on the secondhand market, especially things you have to buy from overseas sellers where there's no possibility of support or returns. This is not like a normal new part where you can purchase it firsthand and expect it to perform as advertised or else get a refund. Furthermore, the (Intel) chipsets on motherboards sold to consumers don't normally support ECC either, so it seems you'd have to get something that's not designed to Intel specifications, probably on Aliexpress, so it's questionable if ECC would even work, and you can certainly forget about any warranty or returns.

Seriously, if you can't just buy it at Best Buy/NewEgg/Amazon (not from 3rd-party overseas sellers), then it's not applicable to this discussion at all.

> if you can't just buy it at Best Buy/NewEgg/Amazon (not from 3rd-party overseas sellers), then it's not applicable to this discussion at all.

Maybe the problems you were having with sourcing the cpus you wanted have something to do with the arbitrary limitations you were working under?

Meanwhile, other people (as per sibling comment) were able to buy these same chips without issue. ;)

> if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.

That's not correct. I literally linked to some non-suffixed processors that support ECC in the comment you're replying to.

I don't see any currently-sold CPUs there. Everything is years out-of-date, maybe even a decade.

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