the way I see it if you want to use the heated seats in your car you should just
pay extra to activate them high beam assist just twist the iDrive dial after
swiping your credit card in the convenient little reader down here I
mean don't get me wrong I know this stuff was already in the car you paid
for I just love the convenience of unlocking things later for more money
thanks Big Otto said no one ever but at
least when it comes to cars the only hurdle is the paywall Intel on the other
hand has sort of been doing this for years except worse because in order to
get access to those hidden features in your CPU you often need to buy outright
different Hardware up front with no way
to unlock them after the fact in today's case we want access to that sweet sweet
ECC or error correcting memory that will
give our 12th gen core processor an extra stability boost but we cannot has
it unless we buy their special workstation grade motherboard with the
w680 chipset which is like what 500 for
a motherboard thing better be very special and very
worth it like our sponsor build Redux build Redux makes it easy to configure
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today this little guy is really cool it's got the ability to use either
regular unbuffered memory modules or ECC
modules but only if you shell out anywhere from two to three hundred
dollars more for a w680 chipset motherboard in our case the Gigabyte
mw34-sp0 but why this consumer grade
board has the exact same CPU socket with
the same copper traces connected to the same ddr4 dim slots and as The Savvy
among you will know the memory controller is baked right into the CPU
these days not the motherboard chipset so how is it that a motherboard could
prevent you from taking this stick of ECC RAM and putting it into a z690 board
the answer is Intel Intel prevents you and unfortunately this isn't exactly a
new business practice from them let's take a little trip down memory lane to
2010 and the first upgradeable Intel
processor the Pentium g6951 nice out of the box it was a two
core two-thread desktop chip with three megabytes of level 3 cash pretty
pedestrian even for the time but the big selling feature was that for an extra 50
bucks you could upgrade both the Chip's
cash and hyper threading capabilities turning it into a g6952 even nicer now
some of you might be thinking well hey that's kind of great isn't it I can save
a buck today and then I can upgrade it later without tearing apart my PC or
taking it to the Geek Squad and you're
right seriously for many people I could
actually see this kind of after the fact upgradeability being not only a
non-issue but even a good thing but I'm not most people let's go back to
cars for a moment many of them have Governors or limiters that cap their
maximum speed and these days they're typically way higher than you should
ever drive on a public road for example in the UK most cars are limited to about
155 miles per hour so most people are
pretty indifferent to them but I also
understand the car enthusiasts who feel like well damn it if I paid for the
whole speedometer then I should be allowed to use it you even if it is only
on track days and that's exactly how I feel about
Electronics if it was already Factory validated to handle the additional
strain whether it's a clock speed Target or a feature then darn it it should be
accessible I mean imagine this in other Industries you buy a backpack from
lttstore.com and half the pockets won't open until you send us another
micropayment I mean to be clear it's a great product and frankly it would still
hold a lot of stuff but have you not already spent enough and in the Pentium
g6951s case we were talking about hyper threading on a dual core chip where it
really does make a huge difference to be clear it's normal to bin
processors according to their capabilities and then turn around and
sell the same silicon at a bunch of different price points in fact around
that same time AMD had tri-core processors in their lineup that were
just quad core processors with one of the cores disabled
the big difference though is that AMD allowed you to play silicon roulette and
turn the extra core on sometimes yeah it
was unstable the thing really was defective but sometimes you got free
real estate good guy AMD enough about ancient history though
let's turn our attention back to the paywall du jour ECC memory on Intel's
12th gen CPU most people think it doesn't matter for gaming rigs but do
they actually know that or have they just bought into the marketing error
correction code or ECC memory is more important than you might think and
there's a reason that it's used in servers around the world the difference
between these two modules the non-ecc and ecc-1 lies primarily in this extra
chip of dram on either side of the stick it acts as a parity check that says hey
all of these bits are valid you're good to go before passing data back and forth
between the RAM and the CPU we explain this in a bit more depth in our last ECC
video but essentially bits can flip
spontaneously and cause soft errors like data corruption or crashes if they
aren't detected and corrected there are a few factors that affect the soft error
rate of memory notable ones include the capacity speed and density all of which
will increase the probability of bit flips as they go up and unfortunately
for us or fortunately I suppose for our gaming FPS RAM does keep getting bigger
faster and denser so perhaps the more
relevant study was one done by Google that showed that roughly 32 percent of
all servers and eight percent of all dims experienced at least one memory
error per year now fortunately for them they were servers and they were using
ECC so these errors were caught and corrected before they could bung up your
YouTube so so so so so so so clearly
there's a valid argument to be made for ECC in modern computers what's the
drawback then there are actually a couple first up is that using ECC memory
in our system did result in lower Benchmark results across the board
compared to regular gaming RAM even running at the same frequency our
crucial ballistics RAM managed performance anywhere from the same to as
much as 20 percent higher than our safe
and stable choice and there's also the small matter of
price while they do use the same commodity chips ECC modules legitimately
cost more to manufacture than typical dims because of those extra parity chips
so this is not just paywall BS with that
said we're talking at best a 12 increase
in materials cost and as for the performance issue well nothing would
actually prevent a memory manufacturer from designing and building higher
performance ECC modules in fact mushkin
does just that and their pricing is pretty reasonable for them kind of like
Floatplane.com which has exclusives like this extra footage from the build with
my sister the big question then is why aren't we all using ECC and basically
it's because Intel decided that consumers either didn't need it or
couldn't afford it and artificially locked the feature to their business
class products for decades the only real difference now is that it's more obvious
now that they've dropped the facade of having parallel Xeon and core branded
product lines that use the exact same silicon but have overclocking and ECC
support as their main differentiating features however the uncomfortable truth
is that Intel really isn't that wrong
about this most consumer desktops are far more likely to crash because of a
Windows update or a driver error Than A Memory bit flip and consumers have shown
time and time again that they would rather save a buck than invest in
Mission critical features like redundant power supplies and ECC
which raises a pretty important question are paywalls actually a better solution
Intel showed us a special motherboard in their Testing Lab that could have its
chipset ID reconfigured on the Fly and
if you could just change your mind and you wanted to overclocking support a
year later wouldn't it be kinda awesome to add the K designation after the fact
I mean if only a fraction of the buyers of a product will use a given feature
doesn't it kind of make sense that they should be the ones to pay for it even if
the cost is disproportionately high this is the defense that I usually see
for Tesla's heated rear seat option in the model 3. it simplifies manufacturing
to just put it in every car they say and that way only the people who buy it end
up covering the cost allowing Tesla to hit a more aggressive base model price
point for everyone else so who cares they say well I do just because a
decision makes business sense doesn't mean that we should lie down and take it
if it is actually a negligible cost to
the point where they're just going to put the seat heating Hardware in every
single car it is then it should just be active on a
forty thousand dollar car just like ECC
should be active on my 500 CPU and
that's without requiring an additional couple hundred bucks for the arbitrary
workstation board that to its credit worked well in our testing but is
missing features that I might care about as a consumer like better IO better vrms
or even aesthetic gimmicks like RGB lighting headers the very worst part of
all of this is that AMD has already shown Intel the path forward Intel just
refuses to take it for years AMD has
taken actually a very similar stance that ECC is a workstation and server
class feature that general consumers probably don't need they only validate
it on their professional products the difference is that like that third core
unlocking situation they haven't outright disabled the function on their
consumer CPUs and chipsets this allows their ecosystem Partners like
motherboard makers to activate it should they choose and this is the best of both
worlds because it gives businesses a validated solution one that they will
pay extra for AMD server CPU sales are clearly doing just fine while still
giving consumers the choice to Save A
Buck or seek out an ECC compatible motherboard and ECC RAM whether it's
because they're sticklers for stability or because they are repurposing their
gaming CPU years down the line as a home storage server which has a clear E-Waste
reduction benefit the ECC controversy though is arguably coming to a close now
that we're moving on to ddr5 which contains eight ECC bits per Channel
but my main point here is not the ECC
memory my main point is that there are many examples of this practice of
locking performance or features behind additional paywalls be it GPU driver
features or overclocking support and as
consumers we should be thinking long and hard about whether it's something that
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
whole Internet Explorer debacle