ecc ram system

[anikhtos]

how more stable is a system build with ecc ram??
worth the efford and the money to build a system with ecc ram support or it is better to go with plain ram?

 

[Elixer]

That all depends on what you are running.
If a server then, yes, if not, then the usual answer is no.
If it is mission critical, then you would be insane not to use ECC RAM.
ECC isn't a magic bullet either, if your system isn't stable (because of o/c or heat or ...) then ECC RAM won't really help that much, if at all.

 

[Cerb]

how more stable is a system build with ecc ram??
worth the efford and the money to build a system with ecc ram support or it is better to go with plain ram?

How important is your work? Really?

Figure you get a few errors a year, between all your devices, maybe. Most will cause no meaningful problems. Software errors are far more prevalent.

But, here's what might happen: a dozen people are working on the same project. As time goes by, problems become more and more common, and you can't track them down. I have read cases of such mayhem cured by ECC on everything, with networked files over long periods of time.

But, see, it's all 'maybe' and 'typical' and whatnot, because: YOU DON'T KNOW.

Correction is a no-brainer, because you need the extra data chips for parity anyway, but for less-than-mission-critical situations, ECC's advantage is in the first two letters. Without ECC, you will have a much higher chance of a hardware problem not being discovered until it hoses your data, and conversely, will have a harder time telling if a given error was caused by software or hardware. That most errors can be corrected, as well, is icing.

Also note, thanks to Google's study, we can say with some confidence that most errors are during read and write, not sitting around waiting for cosmic rays (not that that is necessarily bogus, just that as a lone cause, it doesn't fit what has been observed, and Google has given big sample sizes to previously anecdotal findings).

Quality ranting on the subject:
http://www.realworldtech.com/beta/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=98074&threadid=98073&roomid=2

But if you actually have to then root-cause the problems,
the dynamic changes. At that point, you might literally
not be looking for more reliability, but you want to be
able to get a much better picture of which part
failed. And then ECC is really nice.

End-to-end error-checking (commodity PCs have it everywhere important, these days, except for on RAM) gives you high confidence that, with no reported HW errors, any problems encountered are related to software.

At the end of the day, you're typically fine without it, but I wouldn't run a real server w/o ECC RAM, nor spec any serious work PC (IE, where the correctness of data being worked on is someone's livelihood) w/o it.

P.S. OP, your mobo should work just fine with unbuffered ECC, as will many other AMD boards (not all!).