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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

ECC support is iffy at the consumer brands. Its a "we won't disable it, but we won't guarantee that it works" sort of deal.

If you want verified ECC support, you need to buy the workstation chips and motherboards: Threadripper Pro or EPYCs.

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ECC is supported on the Pro series as well. My home server is running Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G (yay for integrated graphics) and Asrock B550M.

I went through the effort of using qvl memory, but actually testing ECC is a bit more difficult. While ECC is supported & active, memory errors are sadly not reported to the OS. I remember seeing a forum post somewhere of somebody overclocking/undervolting the ram to force errors, but I can't seem to find it right now. There's a fine line between stable, stable with recovered errors, and unstable.

That's what I'm talking about and I wouldn't call it "fully supported". I want to know about ECC statistics. It's important because if I can see that ECC recovers abnormally high number of errors, it's likely that I need to replace RAM right now.

ECC statistics are available for Ryzen if you use Linux (configured to load the appropriate EDAC module).

So on Linux, ECC is fully supported, even with Ryzen.

Do you know for which motherboards this is true? I think ASRock Rack X470D4U should be fine, as they market it as server board.

https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-x470d4u-review-amd-...

I have used an older ASRock MB with the first generation Zen, and it was OK with ECC.

With Ryzen 3xxx, I have used ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE ($315), which is sold as a workstation board, so you definitely should expect ECC to work without problems, and also the Mini-ITX MB ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 ($230), which also worked OK.

I expect that the other ASRock MB's (most of them or maybe all of them specify the support of ECC) also work OK with ECC modules.

The ASrock Rack server board should also not have any problems with ECC. IIRC that server board supports only up to DDR4-2933, but until now faster unbuffered ECC memory modules were not sold anywhere, so that is not a disadvantage.

Edit: I have looked again at the ASRock site and they have updated the memory support specification. If you use only 2 UDIMM modules (i.e. up to 64 GB total), then you can use up to DDR4-3200 (which I have never seen offered anywhere until now; 2666 is easy to find, 2933 is also supported by Intel since March, so it should become available soon).

Sadly, the IPMI implementation in the X470D4U series is awful. The remote console crashes frequently and is generally pretty unreliable. I'm disappointed that Supermicro doesn't have any Ryzen AM4 server boards. AMD getting ignored by many of the server vendors is just a repeat of what happened when the Opteron series was first introduced. At least there are a number of Epyc server boards available.

I don't disagree with you, but when was the last time you ever had to replace a stick of ram?

This year for me.

What operating system? On Linux, I had a memory stick that was not completely inserted, and periodically I saw corrected memory errors reported in the logs until I fixed the issue.

Indeed, forgot to mention this is on Freebsd.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-to-find-out-if-ecc-is...

The latest BIOS for ASUS Prime X370 Pro has ECC explicitly as a configuration option. Seems to work in Linux. I am using 2x8R ECC 2666Mhz RAM from Kingston.

Interesting! Do you think this BIOS or ECC works also on X370 Crosshair VI Hero? Hard to find info on this...

It's up to the motherboard vendor. They'll guarantee that it works if you use memory from the memory QVL.

Example: https://www.asus.com/no/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/HelpDes...

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