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With AMD that limitation is somewhat lifted with normal consumer CPUs and quite a few motherboards having support. Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor av

With AMD that limitation is somewhat lifted with normal consumer CPUs and quite a few motherboards having support. Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor availability. Very few manufacturers offer it and it tends to stick to the standard speeds without any of the overclocked-from-factory parts available with ECC. That last bit is strange because ECC is reportedly very good as a validation tool for overclocking builds so it seems like the RGB-lighted market could end up valuing it as a high-end feature too. One of the RAM manufacturers should rebrand ECC to "Extreme Clocking Capacity" and start selling it as a feature to differentiate their RAM from the competition.

someweirdperson 4y ago
If non-ecc RAM is good enough for most fault sto only cause noticable problems rarely, its possible to sell slightly less perfect modules than with ecc, where even otherwise unnoticable problems are detected and reported. The ratio of modules returned to the manufacturer is probably higher for ecc than non-ecc. Unless ecc modules are already better selected than non-ecc at the manufacturer.
guenthert 4y ago
> That last bit is strange because ECC is reportedly very good as a validation tool for overclocking builds Well, yes, but it's not the only tool. In practice you'd use some validation software suite to find a reasonable stable configuration and afterwards prey. Overclockers, who rather than spending extra money on a CPU which assuredly delivers requested performance stress their hardware beyond specifications, are least likely to pay for the extra bits.
justinclift 4y ago
> Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor availability. That doesn't match up with my experience, even though I've seen it mentioned several times by people as if it's the case. For example, when I went looking for ECC UDIMM sticks for my Ryzen 5600X build a year or so ago, I went looking at the website of my local computer supplier. Many potential options available: https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ecc-&-registered https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ecc-&-registered Now, there aren't as many different options as for non-ECC stuff. eg: https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ddr4 https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ddr4 (many pages of sticks available) But it's not like theres any kind of availability problem. And the Kingston ram I bought happily overclocked to 3200MHz without any effort on my part. Using an ASRock B550M Pro4 motherboard for reference, if that's useful.
- pedrocr 4y ago
  It will depend on where you are. I'm in Europe and it used to be that the usual retailers had no DDR4 ECC options at all. Now there are 1 or 2 available and still no options for DDR5 ECC. Looking at those pages your suppliers seem much better than what I've found so far and yet also have no DDR5 options. Meanwhile DDR5 non-ECC is very broadly available and DDR4 non-ECC has great and mature options.
ezoe 4y ago
Who want overclocking the ECC RAM? You choose ECC because of the stability over performance. Why do you want to reduce the stability?
- enragedcacti 4y ago
  Because given the same chips you can push ECC RAM to speeds beyond what non-ECC RAM can do before corrupting. You can push beyond what the chips are capable of and rely on the error correction to keep your system stable.
  - sliken 4y ago
    ECC in common desktops/workstation/servers will correct all single bit errors and detect all 2 bit errors. So sure you can run dimms every so slightly faster and fix the occasional single bit flip, but even a single double bit flip and an process or your kernel crashes. Seems much saner to go for a safe, robust, and reliable system at standard clocks in ECC instead of trying to get slightly more performance which increases the chances or errors, corruptions, crashes, and shorter service life.

someweirdperson 4y ago

If non-ecc RAM is good enough for most fault sto only cause noticable problems rarely, its possible to sell slightly less perfect modules than with ecc, where even otherwise unnoticable problems are detected and reported. The ratio of modules returned to the manufacturer is probably higher for ecc than non-ecc. Unless ecc modules are already better selected than non-ecc at the manufacturer.

guenthert 4y ago

> That last bit is strange because ECC is reportedly very good as a validation tool for overclocking builds Well, yes, but it's not the only tool. In practice you'd use some validation software suite to find a reasonable stable configuration and afterwards prey. Overclockers, who rather than spending extra money on a CPU which assuredly delivers requested performance stress their hardware beyond specifications, are least likely to pay for the extra bits.

justinclift 4y ago

> Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor availability. That doesn't match up with my experience, even though I've seen it mentioned several times by people as if it's the case. For example, when I went looking for ECC UDIMM sticks for my Ryzen 5600X build a year or so ago, I went looking at the website of my local computer supplier. Many potential options available: https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ecc-&-registered https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ecc-&-registered Now, there aren't as many different options as for non-ECC stuff. eg: https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ddr4 https://www.scorptec.com.au/product/memory/ddr4 (many pages of sticks available) But it's not like theres any kind of availability problem. And the Kingston ram I bought happily overclocked to 3200MHz without any effort on my part. Using an ASRock B550M Pro4 motherboard for reference, if that's useful.

pedrocr 4y ago
It will depend on where you are. I'm in Europe and it used to be that the usual retailers had no DDR4 ECC options at all. Now there are 1 or 2 available and still no options for DDR5 ECC. Looking at those pages your suppliers seem much better than what I've found so far and yet also have no DDR5 options. Meanwhile DDR5 non-ECC is very broadly available and DDR4 non-ECC has great and mature options.

ezoe 4y ago

Who want overclocking the ECC RAM? You choose ECC because of the stability over performance. Why do you want to reduce the stability?

enragedcacti 4y ago
Because given the same chips you can push ECC RAM to speeds beyond what non-ECC RAM can do before corrupting. You can push beyond what the chips are capable of and rely on the error correction to keep your system stable.
- sliken 4y ago
  ECC in common desktops/workstation/servers will correct all single bit errors and detect all 2 bit errors. So sure you can run dimms every so slightly faster and fix the occasional single bit flip, but even a single double bit flip and an process or your kernel crashes. Seems much saner to go for a safe, robust, and reliable system at standard clocks in ECC instead of trying to get slightly more performance which increases the chances or errors, corruptions, crashes, and shorter service life.