| Ryzen ECC support is a mess, no AM4 motherboard currently on the market has implemented ECC support fully and properly (not even Asrock). It's better than nothing but you would be a fool to rely on it. Ryzen motherboard support is what is agreeably a "mess", not the processor itself, but at least it's functional on ASRock and select Gigabyte boards. As for "a fool to rely on it", not sure what you mean by that. The error correction itself is done by the hardware. Other than calling the initialization routines and providing logging/halt, the BIOS/UEFI isn't responsible for anything afaik. I'm well aware that this isn't the full grade of ECC support offered by higher-end Xeons and chipset combos, but it's better than nothing and it's affordable. Also, no offense, but I'm not going to rely on hardwarecanucks as an authority on this subject. All of the modern i3s and Pentiums support ECC, but you do need the server chipset instead of the cheap consumer stuff. Good news though - those "expensive server boards" are roughly the same price as say, an AM4 motherboard with an X370 chipset. The goal isn't ECC alone, at least not for me, the goal is an 8-core system with good single-threaded performance and ECC at a reasonable price. As far as I know, only Ryzen offers that. So for me, I'm looking at the possibility of getting a single system that can give me decent gaming performance, good development performance, ECC support, and more, all at a price that leaves me with money for other components. |
Fine then. AMD says it's unvalidated and unsupported, is that good enough for you?
> I'm well aware that this isn't the full grade of ECC support offered by higher-end Xeons and chipset combos, but it's better than nothing and it's affordable.
So would you be OK with running Xeon engineering samples then? After all - they certainly pass the same "best effort" test. Personally since these are server ES hardware - I'd tend to trust it more than consumer hardware like Ryzen, especially given their comparative age/maturity.
I just picked up a 10-core Haswell Xeon engineering sample for $140 last week. 40% more multi-threaded performance than a Ryzen 1700. The X99 mobo I picked up from Microcenter for $60 doesn't have ECC support but a bunch of them do.
Or if you want something that's official and you know works, there are surplus Sandy Bridge Xeons very cheap nowadays. A decent bit more multithreaded performance than a Ryzen 1700 - but you'll be giving up single-threaded performance. http://natex.us/intel-s2600cp2j-motherboard-dual-e5-2670-sr0...
Or really - a full retail E5-2630 v3 is under $500 now on eBay. That's not really that bad if you just have to have everything in one box.
> So for me, I'm looking at the possibility of getting a single system that can give me decent gaming performance, good development performance, ECC support, and more, all at a price that leaves me with money for other components.
What it comes down to: if you want everything in one box then be prepared to shell out. Everyone has this market segmented out, including AMD (after all they won't stand behind Ryzen's ECC either). If you feel you need ECC, that's really not a valid solution.
If a Xeon doesn't cut it for you - sounds like you might be in the market for two boxes here. A server/workstation with ECC and good multi-thread performance, and a gaming machine that you can overclock and get the best single-thread performance out of.
(Also - in general, overclocking also seems kind of counterproductive to the aims to running ECC RAM - although I guess I haven't looked into that.)