WEBVTT

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the way I see it if you want to use the heated seats in your car you should just

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pay extra to activate them high beam assist just twist the iDrive dial after

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swiping your credit card in the convenient little reader down here I

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mean don't get me wrong I know this stuff was already in the car you paid

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for I just love the convenience of unlocking things later for more money

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thanks Big Otto said no one ever but at

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least when it comes to cars the only hurdle is the paywall Intel on the other

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hand has sort of been doing this for years except worse because in order to

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get access to those hidden features in your CPU you often need to buy outright

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different Hardware up front with no way

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to unlock them after the fact in today's case we want access to that sweet sweet

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ECC or error correcting memory that will

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give our 12th gen core processor an extra stability boost but we cannot has

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it unless we buy their special workstation grade motherboard with the

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w680 chipset which is like what 500 for

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a motherboard thing better be very special and very

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worth it like our sponsor build Redux build Redux makes it easy to configure

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competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself so head to build redux.com Linus and start your new build

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today this little guy is really cool it's got the ability to use either

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regular unbuffered memory modules or ECC

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modules but only if you shell out anywhere from two to three hundred

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dollars more for a w680 chipset motherboard in our case the Gigabyte

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mw34-sp0 but why this consumer grade

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board has the exact same CPU socket with

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the same copper traces connected to the same ddr4 dim slots and as The Savvy

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among you will know the memory controller is baked right into the CPU

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these days not the motherboard chipset so how is it that a motherboard could

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prevent you from taking this stick of ECC RAM and putting it into a z690 board

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the answer is Intel Intel prevents you and unfortunately this isn't exactly a

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new business practice from them let's take a little trip down memory lane to

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2010 and the first upgradeable Intel

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processor the Pentium g6951 nice out of the box it was a two

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core two-thread desktop chip with three megabytes of level 3 cash pretty

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pedestrian even for the time but the big selling feature was that for an extra 50

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bucks you could upgrade both the Chip's

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cash and hyper threading capabilities turning it into a g6952 even nicer now

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some of you might be thinking well hey that's kind of great isn't it I can save

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a buck today and then I can upgrade it later without tearing apart my PC or

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taking it to the Geek Squad and you're

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right seriously for many people I could

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actually see this kind of after the fact upgradeability being not only a

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non-issue but even a good thing but I'm not most people let's go back to

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cars for a moment many of them have Governors or limiters that cap their

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maximum speed and these days they're typically way higher than you should

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ever drive on a public road for example in the UK most cars are limited to about

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155 miles per hour so most people are

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pretty indifferent to them but I also

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understand the car enthusiasts who feel like well damn it if I paid for the

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whole speedometer then I should be allowed to use it you even if it is only

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on track days and that's exactly how I feel about

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Electronics if it was already Factory validated to handle the additional

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strain whether it's a clock speed Target or a feature then darn it it should be

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accessible I mean imagine this in other Industries you buy a backpack from

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lttstore.com and half the pockets won't open until you send us another

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micropayment I mean to be clear it's a great product and frankly it would still

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hold a lot of stuff but have you not already spent enough and in the Pentium

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g6951s case we were talking about hyper threading on a dual core chip where it

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really does make a huge difference to be clear it's normal to bin

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processors according to their capabilities and then turn around and

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sell the same silicon at a bunch of different price points in fact around

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that same time AMD had tri-core processors in their lineup that were

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just quad core processors with one of the cores disabled

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the big difference though is that AMD allowed you to play silicon roulette and

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turn the extra core on sometimes yeah it

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was unstable the thing really was defective but sometimes you got free

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real estate good guy AMD enough about ancient history though

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let's turn our attention back to the paywall du jour ECC memory on Intel's

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12th gen CPU most people think it doesn't matter for gaming rigs but do

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they actually know that or have they just bought into the marketing error

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correction code or ECC memory is more important than you might think and

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there's a reason that it's used in servers around the world the difference

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between these two modules the non-ecc and ecc-1 lies primarily in this extra

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chip of dram on either side of the stick it acts as a parity check that says hey

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all of these bits are valid you're good to go before passing data back and forth

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between the RAM and the CPU we explain this in a bit more depth in our last ECC

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video but essentially bits can flip

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spontaneously and cause soft errors like data corruption or crashes if they

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aren't detected and corrected there are a few factors that affect the soft error

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rate of memory notable ones include the capacity speed and density all of which

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will increase the probability of bit flips as they go up and unfortunately

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for us or fortunately I suppose for our gaming FPS RAM does keep getting bigger

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faster and denser so perhaps the more

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relevant study was one done by Google that showed that roughly 32 percent of

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all servers and eight percent of all dims experienced at least one memory

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error per year now fortunately for them they were servers and they were using

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ECC so these errors were caught and corrected before they could bung up your

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YouTube so so so so so so so clearly

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there's a valid argument to be made for ECC in modern computers what's the

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drawback then there are actually a couple first up is that using ECC memory

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in our system did result in lower Benchmark results across the board

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compared to regular gaming RAM even running at the same frequency our

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crucial ballistics RAM managed performance anywhere from the same to as

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much as 20 percent higher than our safe

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and stable choice and there's also the small matter of

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price while they do use the same commodity chips ECC modules legitimately

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cost more to manufacture than typical dims because of those extra parity chips

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so this is not just paywall BS with that

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said we're talking at best a 12 increase

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in materials cost and as for the performance issue well nothing would

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actually prevent a memory manufacturer from designing and building higher

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performance ECC modules in fact mushkin

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does just that and their pricing is pretty reasonable for them kind of like

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Floatplane.com which has exclusives like this extra footage from the build with

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my sister the big question then is why aren't we all using ECC and basically

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it's because Intel decided that consumers either didn't need it or

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couldn't afford it and artificially locked the feature to their business

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class products for decades the only real difference now is that it's more obvious

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now that they've dropped the facade of having parallel Xeon and core branded

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product lines that use the exact same silicon but have overclocking and ECC

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support as their main differentiating features however the uncomfortable truth

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is that Intel really isn't that wrong

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about this most consumer desktops are far more likely to crash because of a

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Windows update or a driver error Than A Memory bit flip and consumers have shown

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time and time again that they would rather save a buck than invest in

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Mission critical features like redundant power supplies and ECC

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which raises a pretty important question are paywalls actually a better solution

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Intel showed us a special motherboard in their Testing Lab that could have its

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chipset ID reconfigured on the Fly and

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if you could just change your mind and you wanted to overclocking support a

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year later wouldn't it be kinda awesome to add the K designation after the fact

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I mean if only a fraction of the buyers of a product will use a given feature

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doesn't it kind of make sense that they should be the ones to pay for it even if

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the cost is disproportionately high this is the defense that I usually see

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for Tesla's heated rear seat option in the model 3. it simplifies manufacturing

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to just put it in every car they say and that way only the people who buy it end

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up covering the cost allowing Tesla to hit a more aggressive base model price

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point for everyone else so who cares they say well I do just because a

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decision makes business sense doesn't mean that we should lie down and take it

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if it is actually a negligible cost to

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the point where they're just going to put the seat heating Hardware in every

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single car it is then it should just be active on a

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forty thousand dollar car just like ECC

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should be active on my 500 CPU and

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that's without requiring an additional couple hundred bucks for the arbitrary

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workstation board that to its credit worked well in our testing but is

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missing features that I might care about as a consumer like better IO better vrms

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or even aesthetic gimmicks like RGB lighting headers the very worst part of

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all of this is that AMD has already shown Intel the path forward Intel just

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refuses to take it for years AMD has

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taken actually a very similar stance that ECC is a workstation and server

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class feature that general consumers probably don't need they only validate

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it on their professional products the difference is that like that third core

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unlocking situation they haven't outright disabled the function on their

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consumer CPUs and chipsets this allows their ecosystem Partners like

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motherboard makers to activate it should they choose and this is the best of both

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worlds because it gives businesses a validated solution one that they will

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pay extra for AMD server CPU sales are clearly doing just fine while still

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giving consumers the choice to Save A

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Buck or seek out an ECC compatible motherboard and ECC RAM whether it's

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because they're sticklers for stability or because they are repurposing their

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gaming CPU years down the line as a home storage server which has a clear E-Waste

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reduction benefit the ECC controversy though is arguably coming to a close now

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that we're moving on to ddr5 which contains eight ECC bits per Channel

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but my main point here is not the ECC

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memory my main point is that there are many examples of this practice of

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locking performance or features behind additional paywalls be it GPU driver

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features or overclocking support and as

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consumers we should be thinking long and hard about whether it's something that

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we actually want before we stop making noise and just accept it like you accept

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out the one where we talked about Microsoft's dirty practices and that

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whole Internet Explorer debacle