Re:Does MHz Still Matter?
by AnimalMuppet on Friday August 22, 2025 @03:16PM
(#44988677)
Wait, what? ECC RAM for a consumer CPU? Does anyone sell motherboards like that?
Literally first Asrock motherboard I happened to click on has it listed as a feature:
https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X870%20Taichi%20Creator/index....
Asus has options as well such as https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/pr...
I think it was more rare when AM5 first came out, there were a bunch of ECC supported consumer boards for AM4 and threadripper.
Asrock Rack and Supermico sell AM4/AM5 motherboards with support for ECC UDIMMs. Other vendors might state official support on workstation-class motherboards, and in general it might work even on motherboards without official support.
For example
https://www.asus.com/support/faq/1051605/
AMDs I/O die supports ECC RAM, but up to motherboard vendor to run the required traces. Some do, some don't.
"Consumer" shouldn't mean garbage. Between random bit flips in an environment where you have 16 GiB of RAM or more (common in gaming setups now) and Rowhammer, ECC should be the standard. It's only not so that chip and RAM vendors can bin and charge a premium for the good stuff.
Re:Does MHz Still Matter?
by burnt-resistor on Saturday August 23, 2025 @12:37AM
(#44993203)
I have 2 Supermicro H13SAE-MF with Ryzen 9's and ECC UDIMM RAM. It's not registered or LR ECC RAM like a mainstream server though, and not as fancy as Chipkill-like ECC systems. This particular board also accepts EPYC 4004 / 4005 series. I'll probably replace the Ryzens with EPYC 4585PX once they get old enough and cheap enough on the secondary markets. These boxes are 100 Gbps network test nodes.
(I'm currently in the midst of refanning my CSE847-JBOD with bigger, quieter fans and swapping PSUs.)
The larger server grade parts start to shine when the server is doing a lot of different things. The extra memory bandwidth helps keep the CPU fed and the higher core count reduces the need for context switching because your workloads aren’t competing as much.
The best part about the AMD consumer CPUs is that you can even use ECC RAM if you get the right motherboard.