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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

ECC RAM would actually be a boon to everyone, including gamers.

ECC means not only that you know precisely when you've gone too far with overclocking, but potentially allows overclocking a bit further, relying on that some amount of trouble can now be tolerated.

It also means you're not going to break your OS by playing with this stuff. Memory corruption carries a huge risk of disk corruption, which can mean things like corrupt data, random crashes or an unbootable system that persists even after reverting everything to defaults.

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Indeed, because I had ECC RAM I felt comfortable overlocking it, and managed to go from 2400MT/s to 3200MT/s for my home server. A massive difference in performance, while paying only slightly more for ECC.

I doubt that would actually be useful with overclocking. I don't know the arch of the modern PC well enough to say with 100% confidence, but on embedded arches, the RAM has the parity bits checked when they get placed on the bus. If the error happens on data retrieval(or was already present) , then the ECC saves you, but if it happen anywhere else... not really? I don't know if.. ALU's for example automatically include the parity bits in the computation.

You're talking about overclocking the CPU. ECC is more relevant when overclocking the RAM itself, which also affects gaming performance.

They specifically mean overclocking the memory.

The GTX 1080 has GDDR5X, which has ECC. I was able to dial in my memory OC on that card by increasing the clock then running memory throughput benchmarks until the throughput was maxed out. At the point where errors start the theroughput would decrease, but nothing would fail.

Assuming stationary processes this is pretty nice. Maybe bump back 5% for margin.

I believe that's inside the chip, much like DDR5. However that doesn't help if there's an error introduced by the packages, pin, board traces, CPU pins, or CPU.

Better than nothing, but not full ECC either.

You can see here that there are 4 EDC lines used for CRC of every word.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170207162829/https://www.micro...

totally embarrassingly naive question : why bother overclocking ?

Some people prefer to trade off stability for a slight performance improvement. With modern hardware I don't think it's worth it to be honest. I want my computer to work day in and day out even if it means a 2% lower score in some benchmark.

There are also a lot of cases where you can overclock without sacrificing stability. The standard clock speed for any line of processors is simply the minimum it is tested for. But you sometimes get lucky and can get a better chip with more viable transistors. So you can boost the clock ok those and reap the benefits without any drawbacks.

There are sites and services that do "binning" where they test the specific chips and you can buy ones that have been vetted to clock higher.

And undervolting lets a CPU/GPU boost to higher frequency for longer before hitting power/temperature limits or just use less power to hit the same performance. There's a decent chance that any given chip can be undervolted enough to make a notable difference before becoming unstable.

XMP profiles are another example where you can boost RAM speeds without much risk of instability [1]. I assume the manufacturer is just doing binning on their end and selling the higher performing RAM at higher prices.

And the performance differences can be significant: 20% or more in certain workloads.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/what-are-xmp-profiles-and-how-do-i-u...

Yeah personally I’d rather build a PC with efficient power supply and quiet, high performance cooling. No gaudy LEDs either, just a plain case. I want it to be very stable and reliable and unobtrusive.

> No gaudy LEDs either, just a plain case. I want it to be very stable and reliable and unobtrusive.

Good luck with that. https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20160223.shtml

Last time I was looking for a case, this was a real issue.

    Some people prefer to trade off stability for a slight performance improvement.

In my PC, I've got a Intel Core i5-3570K (3.4ghz stock) overclocked to 4.5ghz or something silly like that. I used the motherboard manufacturer's "one touch overclocking" feature to determine that speed years ago and haven't touched it since.

The performance improvement is more than slight. Stability is rock solid across thousands of hours of gaming. I'm not running advanced cooling. $60 Corsair closed loop cooler and three Noctua case fans. System runs cool and quiet, fans throttle up and down nicely. Near silent when idle and still rather quiet under load.

That is a pretty decent gain in performance for zero drawbacks and essentially zero effort.

That's around the last generation when it was worth to overclock things, because the headroom on a typical consumer-grade -K cpu was at least 25%.

Personally, I run a 4670K at 4Ghz, and it's been rock stable as my main machine for the last 8.5 years. It's finally beginning to show its age in 22-23, but the longevity and use I got out of a $200 processor is incredible.

But when CPUs auto-turbo to 5+ Ghz, I agree, overclocking sort of loses its luster.

And with the energy crisis, power consumption is another consideration these days, particularly for a computer that is running all the time.

I think it's mostly pointless in this day and age.

I'm just saying that it has a potential appeal for gamers too, so it's not just a datacenter type of technology that some nerds want to play with.

At the very least it'd make overclocking safer and easier, so any manufacturer making gamer type boards with a lot of overclocking settings in the BIOS should like the idea of it.

The sweet spot for overclocking ECC ram is still before it starts malfunctioning. If it's clocked higher but is correcting for errors it will still be slower.

Entirely depends on error rate

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