Do you think ECC RAM is necessary?

[9lives]

For home use, gaming, surfing, watching DVD. Do you think ECC is necessary?

 

[Windogg]

Nope, in fact there might a small speed penalty.

 

[Shooters]

definitely not, plus as Windogg pointed out you'll take a slight performance hit.

 

[lazyboy]

Unless its a server, no.

 

[dkozloski]

Nine bit memory, parity checking, and data integrity were always a fixation of IBM. When they began to fade as the industry leader the first beloved patriot in the armor came with EDO SIMMS which was just about the first PC memory that was eight bit. The ninth bit was dropped to make the memory competitive price wise. Since then ECC has been for mission critical applications or the obsessive-compulsive only. I don't believe that MAC ever did go down the nine bit road, but correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[esung]

Back in the old days the quality of RAM weren't that good.. So you'll need parity/ECC to detect and fix the RAM error (that's 1 bit out of every 8bits, I think, if there's more, it can do anything)

but nowadays the RAM are very realible, so only the mission critical computers were using it (and those high end workstations need those to jack up the price IMHO)

 

[sharkeeper]

ECC can help if you're in a really high altitude area or around a powerful source of ionising radiation!

Cheers!