I'm a little surprised by Linus's comments. The Xeon e3's are just slightly tweaked core i3/i5/i7s. Similar pricing, similar priced motherboards (maybe anothe

I'm a little surprised by Linus's comments. The Xeon e3's are just slightly tweaked core i3/i5/i7s. Similar pricing, similar priced motherboards (maybe another $30), ECC support, and ever to slightly lower clocks to hit their reliability goals for servers. So I bought a Xeon e3-1230 (forget which gen)_it was cheaper than the (then) top of the line i7, was 100-200MHz slower, and supported ECC. AMD does support ECC with their desktop CPUs, but doesn't guarantee it will work with a given motherboard. Some motherboards "work" in that the ECC dimms are compatable and report extra memory for available, but don't actually implement ECC (actually correcting errors). There's forums to dig around in info, and some motherboard manufacturers test for ECC compatibility and publish the results, other's don't. Personally I prefer the Intel approach, for those willing to pay a bit more per CPU and motherboard get cheap ECC and are guaranteed to work. AMD's approach is leaves more up in the air, you can't just buy a random ryzen, random motherboard, and random ECC dimms and be guaranteed to work. This is however guaranteed with the AMD epyc, but they are MUCH more expensive then the Intel Xeon E3 line.