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Comment by tolien | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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