Linus torvalds may not have been polite about it but he was definitely right
while pc gamers enjoy blazing fast tech in their gaming rigs at home they have
paid a price thanks to Intel's innovative strategy of intentionally
disabling features then giving them back to you in a different more expensive
product this ecc memory that i'm holding
actually physically fits in this slot but it won't work
at least not fully but guess who's got your back
gamers facebook no i'm just kidding it's AMD it's always
AMD isn't it while they haven't fully validated the feature AMD at least had
the decency to leave ecc support enabled
on their consumer platforms leaving it up to motherboard manufacturers to
implement and guess what some of them have
that means that in theory you could have the stability of a server
right in your very own gaming rig raising the question well
should you maybe but first you should check out our
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before we can say if we should use it we need to understand what ecc memory
actually is ecc stands for error correction code
which essentially means the RAM uses clever tricks and specialized code to
find and even correct in real time errors in memory or actually the same
principle can apply to storage to do that ecc RAM modules need extra
memory chips to store parity data which can tell the memory controller on your
CPU what the value of a bit is supposed
to be see here's the thing both of these sticks are labeled 32
gigabytes but this one clearly has nine
chips on it instead of the normal eight now there are a number of different
error correction methods but the most common is sec ded or sec dead hamming
code which can silently correct for a single bit flip or detect when two bits
have flipped and in some cases even inform the user that there's been an
error now what's a bit flip i'm glad you asked it's a spontaneous change in the
stored value of a bit either from a zero total one or vice versa and it can be
caused by minor hardware failure or even external factors such as cosmic rays
no but really and its impact can be tremendous research Labs that run
simulations for example need ecc memory to prevent instabilities or incorrect
values during their calculations for example without ecc a bit flip could
change a byte's value potentially leading to an inaccurate result or even
a system failure depending on the circumstances but
i hear you calling out from your mountain dew decorated desk and dorito
dust coated fingers what does this mean for me the average gamer
well i'm glad you asked that too although games or work from home usually aren't
as high stakes as high precision lab research RAM errors can happen to any
system regardless of what it's being used for or where it is and these aren't
detectable by most normal consumer hardware so they can either go
completely unnoticed or affect a critical bit causing program instability
system instability or even a full-on crash so even if ecc would only kick in
very occasionally just like using raid to protect against a physical drive
failure holy sh
it's a precaution that in an ideal world we would all take all the time
so how do you do it well pretty easily actually there are
different types of ecc memory udems artems lr dims and fb dimms but only you
dims will work with our ryzen setup so that simplifies our choices a little bit
the reason is that the other types of dims have various types of registers
which are designed to take load off of the CPU's memory controller and allow
the system to address a greater capacity of RAM per module and a greater number
of modules overall now that trade-off in
servers and in the data center is worthwhile for the extra latency but on
a desktop we don't really want that anyway so we kitted ourselves out with
four 32 gig sticks of 3200 megahertz
memory from nemix and alright we're ready to start gaming right let's game
not quite these RAM modules are unbuffered so
they'll actually work in any motherboard that supports their capacity and the
ddr4 standard but ecc that ninth chip per side will only
be active if we choose a motherboard that explicitly supports the feature
now we had originally intended to use this one from asrock rack but we had
some difficulty adjusting memory timings so we switched over to an ASUS b550ma
prime motherboard which explicitly lists ecc support to max out our system
because we can we're using four of these to give us a total of 112
gigabytes of RAM in our gaming system and we're hoping that because they run
at high speed similar to gaming modules although not as fast we won't be giving
up too much performance when we pair it up with our ryzen 9 3900 xt and rtx 2080
super and then we're going to be comparing to some crucial ballistics and
wow this um these numbers really aren't impressing
anyone that is unlike our CPU pillow from lttstore.com are you going to throw
that to me ah there it is in games the ecc memory hardly makes any
difference at all which if you think about it kind of is impressive here's
the thing even though both of these kits are
clocked at 3 200 megahertz ecc memory
tends to run at higher latencies even if you don't have a register and these
nemix modules are no exception to that rule the worst performance loss was
about six percent in cs go and otherwise
we were basically within our margin of error so okay how about productivity i
mean this stuff is designed for workstation and server use right so
let's crunch some numbers and if i didn't tell you that these were
different configurations you probably wouldn't know the difference in
performance is even less pronounced than in the few games we tested so if you
were hoping for a performance uplift by spending considerably more on ecc memory
you're in for a big disappointment but you also probably weren't paying
attention to anything that i said up until now anyway ecc isn't about
performance and it never was it's about reliability which is why Linus torvalds
was so upset about the way that Intel artificially locked it out of their
consumer platforms effectively driving up the cost of entry i mean i can see
why Intel did it ecc is critical for professional work
where procurement departments are spending money they didn't have to earn
anyway and won't care about the extra cost as long as it has some benefit to
their business it's only a nice to have for everyone
else but he made a couple of other excellent points
first that the marketing that ecc shouldn't be important to gamers or
overclockers is nonsense 100 man like what regular people aren't
doing anything important and they should just deal with random crashes and then
have no idea what caused them even if it was a defective memory module and guys
for years i've been saying overclocking your system memory isn't worth it you
know why i've said that because under normal circumstances with unbuffered
non-ecc dimps you have no way of knowing
if it's operating correctly at your overclocked speed if it had ecc it would
spit out an error right away when you push it too far and his other point was
that as memory speeds have continued to ramp up it's become more and more
essential to the point where they can't keep ignoring it ddr5 actually has ecc
built right into the standard now so the bottom line is if you're all
about redlining performance and saving a buck ecc probably isn't going to make it
into your gaming rig yet but if you want the utmost instability and you don't
mind losing a few FPS here and there hey
at least AMD gives you the option so thanks AMD and thanks Linus for bringing
this to everyone's attention in your characteristic not to mention charming
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video investigating the performance differences between gaming RAM and ecc
memory on ryzen you might also enjoy our look at different speeds of gaming RAM
on ryzen and how they impact performance it's a good one