81–90 of 146 posts
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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.
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These things are not comparable.
The miserable industry response to Row Hammer makes ECC RAM a necessity for anyone doing dangerous human rights work.
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And AMD, and Nvidia.
AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support, but it varies by motherboard. My home NAS runs a Ryzen in an ASrock Rack motherboard with ECC ram. I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.
I've basically given up on maintaining large digital media collections for long term purposes. It puts my OCD in overdrive.
Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.
It's worth keeping in mind that the chipset has zero involvement in ECC. The CPU is directly attached to the memory slots. They're using the chipset as an expensive dongle.
Personally used about an even split of ECC vs. non-ECC RAM over the last ~30 years and can't say I've ever encountered any problems with non-ECC RAM. If it happened it was no significance for me to notice. Professionally yeah I've run across a server here and there report bit errors but it was a four leaf clover the of thing. Not unheard of but not common. The more important thing in my experience is using high quali…
If you're relying on your computer to be 100% error-free (eg: doing professional work), paying some extra for ECC RAM support isn't even a drop in the bucket. You either do or don't, money isn't an object.
If you're Joe Average browsing Hacker News or playing some games at home, who cares if you win the bit flip lottery?
Would it be nice for ECC RAM to be more mainstream? Sure. But the fact it is not isn't breaking anyones' backs either.
> 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…
memtest86 needs to run alone so it can test the entire physical RAM, and the actual, meaningful tests that actually test RAM and not L1 take forever to run. What would you have the OS do?
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It's worth keeping in mind that the chipset has zero involvement in ECC. The CPU is directly attached to the memory slots. They're using the chipset as an expensive dongle.
Well, the chipset does enable error detection and correction features, because it is the responsibility of the chipset to raise certain interrupts or assert this or that signal in certain error cases. You may view this as artificial segmentation but without the more advanced management engine in the Q680 and W680 chipsets, the Z690 and all lower chipsets that contain the simpler "client" i.e. consumer management engi…
Even so that's an extremely trivial task. It doesn't need a "more advanced" anything. It needs them to not deliberately disable the code or remove the tiny tiny amount of circuit.