On 2025-12-01 Hartmut W Sager wrote:
Back in the day when I was assembling desktop computers for myself and for customers, I always chose Asus and ECS (Elite Systems Group) motherboards that supported ECC RAM, and I always installed ECC RAM on those motherboards. I came from the IBM System/360 background, which famously did full-fledged ECC, and I automatically carried that mindset forward.
IBM has Chipkill, which I wish was available on non-"Big Iron". But in general ECC will stop most errors, especially cosmic-ray ones. (Flawed memory modules with entire rows blowing up is a bit different.) The odds of the system not at least detecting a (low-)multi-bit-flip error are astronomically low.
As a reminder, it is possible today to buy ECC on consumer grade hardware without having to splurge on Xeon or similar. And you can do it and still get a x16 slot for a real video card. You just have to buy the "right" Ryzen mobo and cpu -- I'm using one to type this email. And in a shameless act of plugging, my own company specializes in selling such hardware -- so ask me about it at a meeting if you want to get one for yourself! :-)