51–60 of 146 posts
AMD seems to support ECC on some consumer-level chipsets, but it's a nightmare to sort it all out and verify that all the bits are actually functioning properly.
Unfortunately DDR5 is going to complicate rather than fix the story.
It's very strange that DDR5 mandates internal ECC within each physical package, but not on the longer and possibly more EMI sensitive connections between the memory chips and controller. I would have thought that the additional cost would be minimal (additional wiring on the logic board in some cases), but maybe this is just more artificial market segmentation?
Thinking about it, when a DIMM doesn't have extra RAM chips for ECC, you could reuse the ECC pins to run a parity bit to each chip. It would cost nothing. And with DDR5 having 2x8 ECC pins, it would work with any chip layout: x16, x8, or x4.
At least make it user-configurable! I'd trade off a bit of memory capacity for ECC protection in a heartbeat.
I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?
I very highly doubt so. I remember BSOD and Guru meditations (on the Amiga) before that. Once I switched to Linux suddenly no more BSOD and very little kernel panics. I've had at times my desktop reach six months of uptime.
I think bit-flips are a great excuse for unreliable software.
BTW I'm not saying ECC is unnecessary: I'm saying it's unlikely the lack of ECC was the reason for most of the BSOD you saw throughout the ages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some people prefer to trade off stability for a slight performance improvement.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ch…
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...
> a multitude of bit flip errors ECC can only report >1 bit flip per word. It can't correct it. If your memory is going bad, the chance of multiple bit failure is going to be much higher than the stray bit flip from other causes (mind you, I have 32GB ECC running right now and have seen zero bit flips over 1.5 years). I'm not arguing against ECC. I have it and run it myself. But this blog post is an argument for ZFS…
When a chip starts going bad, the thousands of error reports will more than make up for the errors that slip through.
Just make sure reporting is working.
> Well...
Well what?
Those drives were lying about finishing writes, which is barely related to losing data that was written, and especially data that was written more than a few seconds ago. And if drives didn't have ECC, data loss would be a million times more common.
> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…
Because any equivalent of memtestx86 will flag a LOT of hardware for the buggy piles of shit that they really are.
If Windows started flagging people's crappy cheap hardware, Microsoft would get a lot of grief and have to spend a chunk of money on customer support and PR.
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 l…
> It was the worst-case scenario for RAM failure: bit flip errors that get written back to the disk. I discovered that several video files that I had been editing had corrupted bits, and were no longer usable. What a horrible failure mode! Kudos to the OP for even thinking to investigate this. The mentioned memtest86 tool sounds quite useful - so useful, in fact, that it seems it should be part of the operating syste…