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I've got a nagging question about this, since this topic comes up again and again and I'm planning to buy a new machine soon after having run an overclocked i7

I've got a nagging question about this, since this topic comes up again and again and I'm planning to buy a new machine soon after having run an overclocked i7 920 for many years: How important is ECC RAM if I want 32 GB or more RAM? What are the consequences of not having ECC RAM? I'll probably go for AMD this time anyway, but was wondering in general how important that is. Are non-ECC machines known to crash? Wouldn't that be a factory design flaw that would need to be fixed, at least according to EU consumer protection laws?

Filligree 9y ago
Typically what happens is silent corruption. Rarely, very rarely you'll get a crash, but even if a bit flips inside of program code there's no guarantee that that code will ever run again -- and if it does, the malfunction might not be obvious. Most memory is non-program data, however, and most non-program data won't cause obvious errors if corrupted. A picture that renders incorrectly, a broken model in a game, a single burst of static in a video... It's insidious precisely because it's hard to notice, and corruption never gets better over time.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  That certainly makes sense for files, which are read into memory and written back to disk, potentially corrupt - but I wouldn't expect most compiled code to be written back to disk? (I am still on an old cheese-grater Mac Pro, so my 32GB are ECC which means I'm not worried personally, just curious).
vbezhenar 9y ago
Another important advantage of ECC RAM is early detecting of malfunctioning memory. I've yet to hear from anyone that he's regularly running memtest. While cosmic rays might be rare event, bad memory stick is certainly possible and it'll produce much more errors than cosmic rays. Some people live with it for a long time, cursing their blue-screened OS or "access violation error" programs. It's hard to distinguish software bugs from hardware bugs. ECC will let you know about it immediately.

Filligree 9y ago

Typically what happens is silent corruption. Rarely, very rarely you'll get a crash, but even if a bit flips inside of program code there's no guarantee that that code will ever run again -- and if it does, the malfunction might not be obvious. Most memory is non-program data, however, and most non-program data won't cause obvious errors if corrupted. A picture that renders incorrectly, a broken model in a game, a single burst of static in a video... It's insidious precisely because it's hard to notice, and corruption never gets better over time.

blacksmith_tb 9y ago
That certainly makes sense for files, which are read into memory and written back to disk, potentially corrupt - but I wouldn't expect most compiled code to be written back to disk? (I am still on an old cheese-grater Mac Pro, so my 32GB are ECC which means I'm not worried personally, just curious).

vbezhenar 9y ago

Another important advantage of ECC RAM is early detecting of malfunctioning memory. I've yet to hear from anyone that he's regularly running memtest. While cosmic rays might be rare event, bad memory stick is certainly possible and it'll produce much more errors than cosmic rays. Some people live with it for a long time, cursing their blue-screened OS or "access violation error" programs. It's hard to distinguish software bugs from hardware bugs. ECC will let you know about it immediately.