So whats the advantage to ECC and why would you choose to go with ECC over more, faster memory, cheaper?
I've seen ECC touted in much marketing, but the usecases to me seem, well boutique, such as video or computer graphics rendering.
For me, the reason to go ECC was just to prevent silent file corruption. With 64 GB, the math is in favor of me seeing bit flips. Moreover, I tend to put my machine to sleep, rather than shut it off, which also increases the likelihood of memory errors. I wouldn't say I have a highly specialized workload outside of the occasional VM, consisting of large files, for development. A lot of it is I just didn't want to deal with silent corruption of family photos & videos, even if the underlying file formats are pretty resilient.
Personally, I think the situation should be flipped. Everyone should run with ECC these days and only run without for specialized environments like gaming where you want to squeeze out every FPS you can. Faster memory isn't going to matter for most situations.
But for everything else, it's a scale of needs, sure the low-end would be a gaming console or graphics memory, but if that gap gets smaller, uptake and usage will scale as that advantage becomes cost effective at various consumer levels.
But having the option of choice, is and always been a huge plus for any consumer - AMD makes that choice far more accessible than Intel. Though I do see a mobile phone maker going ECC as the turning point in uptake and making that price gap more palatable in the end.
If you use it just for media consumption and playing games, anything goes.
A good power supply and ECC RAM make a very stable PC.
Whether one cares about that is one's own tradeoff.