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It doesn't help that Intel has artificially limited ECC support to specific processors. As the amount of memory in PC increases and the frequency at which components operate, the probability of memory errors increases, yet Intel still foolishly refuses to support ECC in their consumer line selling it as a "server" feature and limiting it to Xeons.

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Linus posted about this a while ago: http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=114758&curposti...

"Who the f*ck are they to send me reliability patches, when they can't even get the basics right?"

I remember reading Microsoft made a push to get hardware vendors to use ECC Ram with Vista - they recognized a lot of crashes were due to this (but XP would get the blame). No go.

Perhaps AMD could enable ECC on their consumer CPUs?

AMD does for their Athlon FX processors, but support is mostly dependent on the motherboard. With that said, most of the AMD motherboards for AM3+ support it, and it's limited to unbuffered ECC.

Unfortunately, that means choosing ECC over power and performance vs. Intel. It's really a sad state of affairs.

They do. Motherboard vendors often fail to support it, unfortunately, but the CPUs generally aren't the weak link.

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