WEBVTT

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Linus torvalds may not have been polite about it but he was definitely right

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while pc gamers enjoy blazing fast tech in their gaming rigs at home they have

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paid a price thanks to Intel's innovative strategy of intentionally

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disabling features then giving them back to you in a different more expensive

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product this ecc memory that i'm holding

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actually physically fits in this slot but it won't work

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at least not fully but guess who's got your back

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gamers facebook no i'm just kidding it's AMD it's always

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AMD isn't it while they haven't fully validated the feature AMD at least had

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the decency to leave ecc support enabled

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on their consumer platforms leaving it up to motherboard manufacturers to

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implement and guess what some of them have

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that means that in theory you could have the stability of a server

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right in your very own gaming rig raising the question well

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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

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actually is ecc stands for error correction code

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which essentially means the RAM uses clever tricks and specialized code to

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find and even correct in real time errors in memory or actually the same

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principle can apply to storage to do that ecc RAM modules need extra

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memory chips to store parity data which can tell the memory controller on your

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CPU what the value of a bit is supposed

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to be see here's the thing both of these sticks are labeled 32

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gigabytes but this one clearly has nine

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chips on it instead of the normal eight now there are a number of different

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error correction methods but the most common is sec ded or sec dead hamming

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code which can silently correct for a single bit flip or detect when two bits

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have flipped and in some cases even inform the user that there's been an

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error now what's a bit flip i'm glad you asked it's a spontaneous change in the

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stored value of a bit either from a zero total one or vice versa and it can be

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caused by minor hardware failure or even external factors such as cosmic rays

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no but really and its impact can be tremendous research Labs that run

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simulations for example need ecc memory to prevent instabilities or incorrect

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values during their calculations for example without ecc a bit flip could

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change a byte's value potentially leading to an inaccurate result or even

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a system failure depending on the circumstances but

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i hear you calling out from your mountain dew decorated desk and dorito

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dust coated fingers what does this mean for me the average gamer

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well i'm glad you asked that too although games or work from home usually aren't

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as high stakes as high precision lab research RAM errors can happen to any

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system regardless of what it's being used for or where it is and these aren't

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detectable by most normal consumer hardware so they can either go

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completely unnoticed or affect a critical bit causing program instability

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system instability or even a full-on crash so even if ecc would only kick in

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very occasionally just like using raid to protect against a physical drive

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failure holy sh

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it's a precaution that in an ideal world we would all take all the time

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so how do you do it well pretty easily actually there are

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different types of ecc memory udems artems lr dims and fb dimms but only you

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dims will work with our ryzen setup so that simplifies our choices a little bit

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the reason is that the other types of dims have various types of registers

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which are designed to take load off of the CPU's memory controller and allow

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the system to address a greater capacity of RAM per module and a greater number

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of modules overall now that trade-off in

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servers and in the data center is worthwhile for the extra latency but on

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a desktop we don't really want that anyway so we kitted ourselves out with

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four 32 gig sticks of 3200 megahertz

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memory from nemix and alright we're ready to start gaming right let's game

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not quite these RAM modules are unbuffered so

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they'll actually work in any motherboard that supports their capacity and the

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ddr4 standard but ecc that ninth chip per side will only

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be active if we choose a motherboard that explicitly supports the feature

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now we had originally intended to use this one from asrock rack but we had

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some difficulty adjusting memory timings so we switched over to an ASUS b550ma

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prime motherboard which explicitly lists ecc support to max out our system

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because we can we're using four of these to give us a total of 112

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gigabytes of RAM in our gaming system and we're hoping that because they run

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at high speed similar to gaming modules although not as fast we won't be giving

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up too much performance when we pair it up with our ryzen 9 3900 xt and rtx 2080

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super and then we're going to be comparing to some crucial ballistics and

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wow this um these numbers really aren't impressing

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anyone that is unlike our CPU pillow from lttstore.com are you going to throw

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that to me ah there it is in games the ecc memory hardly makes any

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difference at all which if you think about it kind of is impressive here's

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the thing even though both of these kits are

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clocked at 3 200 megahertz ecc memory

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tends to run at higher latencies even if you don't have a register and these

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nemix modules are no exception to that rule the worst performance loss was

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about six percent in cs go and otherwise

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we were basically within our margin of error so okay how about productivity i

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mean this stuff is designed for workstation and server use right so

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let's crunch some numbers and if i didn't tell you that these were

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different configurations you probably wouldn't know the difference in

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performance is even less pronounced than in the few games we tested so if you

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were hoping for a performance uplift by spending considerably more on ecc memory

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you're in for a big disappointment but you also probably weren't paying

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attention to anything that i said up until now anyway ecc isn't about

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performance and it never was it's about reliability which is why Linus torvalds

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was so upset about the way that Intel artificially locked it out of their

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consumer platforms effectively driving up the cost of entry i mean i can see

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why Intel did it ecc is critical for professional work

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where procurement departments are spending money they didn't have to earn

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anyway and won't care about the extra cost as long as it has some benefit to

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their business it's only a nice to have for everyone

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else but he made a couple of other excellent points

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first that the marketing that ecc shouldn't be important to gamers or

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overclockers is nonsense 100 man like what regular people aren't

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doing anything important and they should just deal with random crashes and then

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have no idea what caused them even if it was a defective memory module and guys

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for years i've been saying overclocking your system memory isn't worth it you

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know why i've said that because under normal circumstances with unbuffered

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non-ecc dimps you have no way of knowing

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if it's operating correctly at your overclocked speed if it had ecc it would

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spit out an error right away when you push it too far and his other point was

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that as memory speeds have continued to ramp up it's become more and more

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essential to the point where they can't keep ignoring it ddr5 actually has ecc

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built right into the standard now so the bottom line is if you're all

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about redlining performance and saving a buck ecc probably isn't going to make it

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into your gaming rig yet but if you want the utmost instability and you don't

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mind losing a few FPS here and there hey

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at least AMD gives you the option so thanks AMD and thanks Linus for bringing

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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

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memory on ryzen you might also enjoy our look at different speeds of gaming RAM

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on ryzen and how they impact performance it's a good one