> I have hit soft errors in every desktop machine that used ECC.

Not sure if I should start getting nervous or just your RAM sucks ;) I get ECC errors only if I overclock too much, and I run the RAM overclocked all time. It's actually one of the reasons I wanted ECC.

Different RAM, more soft errors the older a system gets. Heh, the system should auto over clock until it starts to get correctable soft errors and then back off. Or reduce refresh until soft errors and then bump it up. Max speed at the lowest power.

How much more expensive is ECC ram? I don't have it and I've never experienced obvious issues, if it's a lot more expensive it's not really worth it for the once or twice the desktop will likely experience an actual issue

Should be about 1/8th more since it's just a 72-bit bus for carrying 64-bits data and 8-bits check. Or rather, your dimm will have 9 chips instead of 8.

How they get you is Intel will sell you a xeon which is the exact same die as an i5 in a different package for more money.

Depends what you need - you can pick up older gen Xeon chips for cheap and the performance often isn't that much worse than modern consumer grade stuff. If you're looking to build a consumer-level NAS or home server, Avoton is pretty cheap and takes ECC RAM.

Unfortunately, Avoton might just suddenly stop working on you.

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-qui...

Some i3s support ECC: 7th gen: http://ark.intel.com/products/97125/Intel-Core-i3-7101TE-Pro... 6th gen: http://ark.intel.com/products/90731/Intel-Core-i3-6300-Proce...

It should be 1/8th more, plus a bit for the scrubber. But in practice ECC memory is "enterprise priced" so it's more like double.

Should we do a Kickstarter to manufacture our own DIMMs? Its an easy design and I hate donating to some corporate gross margins. Maybe enough people feel the same.

It's significantly more expensive, usually around 30-100% more, depending on capacity. IMO not worth it on a desktop, possibly worth it on a home server or a serious workstation. Plus your CPU and motherboard has to support it, which is a pain with Intel's consumer lineup.

Good thing ryzen supports ECC OBO. Just waiting on motherboard support for it.

Lots of Ryzen motherboards support ECC.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/#Specific...

I think I may go AMD (again) for this very reason.

(Generally, I don't think ECC actually does matter that much for us casual/home users, but I like to reward the people who actually do make it easy to "do the right thing". Same deal as only purchasing AMD graphics cards since 2005-ish(?).)

If you're not worried about certain chip features and power draw, last gen server equipment is very cheap.

usually its cheaper because of server market forced upgrade cycle surplus. Problem is its mostly Buffered/Registered ECC which cant be used in desktop motherboards.