Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2048 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2048

All AMD processors have supported ECC for a very long time, its trivial to support it, Intel have just decided to gate it as a premium feature.

View on HN

Sort of - they let mainboard vendors decide whether to support it or not, which means it can be a crapshoot. For example, MSI's been known in the past to kill ECC support with a BIOS update; some vendors have tested that you can use ECC RAM but won't enable any of the error correction (for example, Gigabyte say this in [1]: "non-ECC mode".)

Selfishly I really wish they would make it easier, because I'm in the market for a new personal-use storage machine and I've spent far too long researching all this crap but it's looking like I'll have much more certainty that it'll all just work if I buy a Xeon E3/E-2000 series and that's unfortunate.

1: http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_ga-h11...

Asrock have been good in my experience at enabling all features on their boards. Back when Intel's Vt-d support depended on your board they reliably had support, and I believe they support ECC on all their new AMD boards.

I can confirm that ECC at least works for their Threadripper mainboards.

I have ECC working on an AB350M Pro4. See also https://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-revie... The 'edac_mce_amd' module needs to be loaded on Linux.

I have one too, seems to be trucking along fine.

If it helps, I have a Gigabyte Designare X399 EX and it has full ECC support (have 64GB installed at the moment, edac-util checks out).

It is TR4 though. I grabbed a 1920X after the price drops.

If you’re wanting a storage box usually it’s just less headache to buy used server gear off eBay. Plenty of bays, DDR3 RDIMM’s are cheap, and power efficient ivy/sandy bridge systems are finally in affordable price ranges.

I’m the kind of person that lurks in /r/homelab though - so I’ve also got a 25U rack to keep all my gear. If you want a tower to stuff in a corner things get more dicey.

2011-1 systems really aren't that power efficient. 16 DIMMs, 2 sockets will draw ~120 W idle.

Don’t populate all 16 DIMM’s unless you need that much memory? Both my single-socket R320 and dual-socket R520 idle at 70W each with 6 DIMM’s installed.

Most people probably don’t need the gobs of memory I have either. A R520 with one socket populated and 2x8 or 16GB dual-ranked RDIMM’s would be more than sufficient.

I actually misspoke. The system above was configured with only 8 DIMMs (8 GB each) at the time. That's the lower limit for this platform before performance is degraded.

Single socket Ivy/Sandy Bridge-EN servers exist and only need three DIMM’s for max performance, that’s what I run FreeNAS on (R320 with a E5-2450L, mind you I have six DIMM’s).

I recently built a home server with Ryzen 5 2500. Pretty happy with it. Not using ecc ram though.

I recall hearing that certain motherboard manufacturers were disabling ECC for their lower-end AMD boards.

Does anyone know if this was ever confirmed or not?

My newly purchased Gigabyte B450M DS3H, says clearly 'Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs'. https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Motherboard/B450M-DS3H-rev-10#kf

It also mentions that:

>Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)

Note the operate in non-ECC mode remark.

Seems pretty clear to me. The CPU might allow ECC but now it's the motherboard playing tricks.

I also have a Gigabyte motherboard. Pretty disappointed that it doesn't have ECC support. For my next machine I will look more closely.

playing tricks as in not routing the extra lines

I don't know the hardware details, but as a buyer this is like moving the goalpost.

It was always the CPU that didn't have ECC, but now apparently your whole system has to be designed to be a fancy workstation.

Everybody keeps repeating AMD supports ECC out of the box, but the fact that you will most likely not have an AM4 motherboard which does have ECC enabled is new to me.

the irony ..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com