I don't have any information or opinion regarding the choice of cpu but I doubt your crashes are due to not having ECC, unless the machine has a bad memory modu

I don't have any information or opinion regarding the choice of cpu but I doubt your crashes are due to not having ECC, unless the machine has a bad memory module. It's more likely to be a software problem, maybe driver related. Failing that it could be bad hardware. My current laptop (running Linux), which certainly doesn't have ECC, hasn't had a system crash since I've had it, which is well over a year. In my experience system crashes with properly working software and hardware should be exceedingly rare, even without ECC. Granted none of my machines have had 32 GB of RAM, my current laptop has 8 GB, but that's only a factor of 4 difference and I'm pretty sure my accumulated experience with various machines adds up to far less than 1 unexplained system crash per month per 32 GB.