Definitely true. Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on

Definitely true. Tangent: a lot of people wonder who would pay $1700 for a 6950X. The answer I always give is "people want to do intensive work and gaming on the same system". Otherwise the 4/6C chips are better choices for the money. The great weakness of that system is - as you note - the lack of ECC. I strongly, strongly recommend building two different systems for this situation. Depending on your needs it can almost be more economical to do it this way. i3s (and now Pentiums) support ECC and make good ZFS servers. The 4C Xeons aren't too bad either. You can also do some cheap E5 Xeon builds using engineering samples. Many-core Xeons are more than sufficient for the kind of stuff you need ECC for, even at relatively low clock rates. A 10C at 2.4 GHz is roughly comparable to 6C at 4.13 GHz (I use mine in Handbrake). And uses 2/3 of the power to boot. And then you can focus on gaming performance in your gaming system. Like 3x as much for a given level of performance. It's a lot like laptops. You're going to spend a lot more if you insist on only owning one system that can do everything. The segmentation here does suck, I would rather see it supported even on consumer hardware, but practically speaking I don't think Intel is going to change this any time soon. Even if AMD does. (and note: unless the manufacturer is willing to stand behind ECC, Ryzens's "unofficial" ECC support holds about as much weight as using Intel's engineering samples)