The Controversy of ECC Memory and its Implications for Consumer Desktops

At best, a 12 increase in materials cost is all that can be attributed to the use of ECC memory in consumer desktops. This may seem like a small price to pay for the added stability and reliability that ECC provides, but it's still a significant amount of money. However, there's another issue at play here: performance. ECC memory can provide improved performance in certain applications, such as server workloads, but its benefits are not immediately apparent to consumers.

Nothing would prevent a memory manufacturer from designing and building higher-performance ECC modules if they wanted to. In fact, companies like Mushkin have already taken this approach and offer high-quality ECC memory at reasonable prices. The big question is why other manufacturers aren't following suit. One possible reason is that Intel has artificially locked the feature to their business-class products for decades. This has meant that consumers are stuck with lower-performance ECC options or have been forced to opt for more expensive server-grade RAM.

However, it's worth noting that this stance is not entirely justified. Most consumer desktops are far more likely to crash due to a Windows update or driver error than a memory bit flip. Consumers have shown time and time again that they would rather save a buck than invest in mission-critical features like redundant power supplies and ECC. This is particularly true for users who purchase systems with the intention of repurposing them as home storage servers years down the line.

The uncomfortable truth is that Intel really isn't that wrong about this. Many consumers are not concerned with the stability and reliability provided by ECC memory, especially if it's not immediately apparent in their everyday usage. In fact, some users may even be unaware that ECC memory exists or its benefits. This raises an important question: should paywalls for features like ECC be considered acceptable?

Intel has shown us examples of special motherboards in their testing lab that can have their chipset ID reconfigured on the fly. If a user could just change their mind and wanted to add overclocking support, wouldn't it be awesome to do so later? It's worth noting that if only a fraction of buyers of a product will use a given feature, doesn't it make sense that they should be the ones to pay for it, even if the cost is disproportionately high? This is essentially the defense used by Tesla for their heated rear seat option in the Model 3. They claim that simplifying manufacturing by putting the feature in every car saves them money and allows them to hit a more aggressive base model price point.

However, this approach raises concerns about fairness and transparency. If the cost of ECC memory is truly negligible, then it should be included on all systems, regardless of whether the user wants it or not. The current system of only including ECC memory in "workstation" products can be seen as a form of exclusionary pricing. It's also worth noting that AMD has taken a different approach to this issue. They validate ECC memory on their professional-grade CPUs and offer server-specific versions, but they also leave the feature enabled on their consumer CPUs.

This allows motherboard manufacturers to activate it if they choose to, giving businesses a validated solution that they are willing to pay extra for. This approach also provides consumers with the option to save money by opting out of ECC memory or seeking out an ECC-compatible motherboard and ECC RAM. The benefits of this approach include reduced e-waste from users repurposing their gaming CPUs years down the line.

The controversy surrounding ECC memory is arguably coming to a close now that we're moving on to DDR5, which contains eight ECC bits per channel. However, my main point here is not the specifics of ECC memory, but rather its implications for consumers and manufacturers alike. As we move forward in the world of computing, it's essential to think critically about the features and technologies that are being developed.

There are many examples of this practice of locking performance or features behind additional paywalls, such as GPU driver features or overclocking support. Consumers should be thinking long and hard about whether these features are something they actually want before accepting them at face value. The decision to include or exclude features like ECC memory from consumer products is a complex one that requires careful consideration.

As consumers, we have the power to drive change by making our voices heard. We can support manufacturers who prioritize transparency and fairness, and we can choose not to support those who continue to lock features behind paywalls. By doing so, we can create a more equitable market where consumers are truly in control of their purchasing decisions.

Meanwhile, let's take a moment to appreciate the innovative work being done by companies like Jackery. Their solar-ready portable power stations, such as the new Solar Generator 1000 Pro, are designed to improve outdoor life by providing power whenever and wherever needed. With three times faster charging than the normal SG-1000, this power station is perfect for those who need a reliable source of energy on the go. By plugging it into the wall, you can get a full charge in under two hours, delivering up to 1,000W of clean energy.

This technology has far-reaching implications for outdoor enthusiasts, emergency responders, and anyone who needs a portable power solution. It's an example of how innovation can bring people together and improve our lives, even if it means making some tough decisions about what features we want in our products.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe way I see it if you want to use the heated seats in your car you should just pay extra to activate them high beam assist just twist the iDrive dial after swiping your credit card in the convenient little reader down here I mean don't get me wrong I know this stuff was already in the car you paid for I just love the convenience of unlocking things later for more money thanks Big Otto said no one ever but at least when it comes to cars the only hurdle is the paywall Intel on the other hand has sort of been doing this for years except worse because in order to get access to those hidden features in your CPU you often need to buy outright different Hardware up front with no way to unlock them after the fact in today's case we want access to that sweet sweet ECC or error correcting memory that will give our 12th gen core processor an extra stability boost but we cannot has it unless we buy their special workstation grade motherboard with the w680 chipset which is like what 500 for a motherboard thing better be very special and very worth it like our sponsor build Redux build Redux makes it easy to configure your new build with support guides to help along the way they also offer competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself so head to build redux.com Linus and start your new build today this little guy is really cool it's got the ability to use either regular unbuffered memory modules or ECC modules but only if you shell out anywhere from two to three hundred dollars more for a w680 chipset motherboard in our case the gigabyte mw34-sp0 but why this consumer grade board has the exact same CPU socket with the same copper traces connected to the same ddr4 dim slots and as The Savvy among you will know the memory controller is baked right into the CPU these days not the motherboard chipset so how is it that a motherboard could prevent you from taking this stick of ECC RAM and putting it into a z690 board the answer is Intel Intel prevents you and unfortunately this isn't exactly a new business practice from them let's take a little trip down memory lane to 2010 and the first upgradeable Intel processor the Pentium g6951 nice out of the box it was a two core two-thread desktop chip with three megabytes of level 3 cash pretty pedestrian even for the time but the big selling feature was that for an extra 50 bucks you could upgrade both the Chip's cash and hyper threading capabilities turning it into a g6952 even nicer now some of you might be thinking well hey that's kind of great isn't it I can save a buck today and then I can upgrade it later without tearing apart my PC or taking it to the Geek Squad and you're right seriously for many people I could actually see this kind of after the fact upgradeability being not only a non-issue but even a good thing but I'm not most people let's go back to cars for a moment many of them have Governors or limiters that cap their maximum speed and these days they're typically way higher than you should ever drive on a public road for example in the UK most cars are limited to about 155 miles per hour so most people are pretty indifferent to them but I also understand the car enthusiasts who feel like well damn it if I paid for the whole speedometer then I should be allowed to use it you even if it is only on track days and that's exactly how I feel about Electronics if it was already Factory validated to handle the additional strain whether it's a clock speed Target or a feature then darn it it should be accessible I mean imagine this in other Industries you buy a backpack from lttstore.com and half the pockets won't open until you send us another micropayment I mean to be clear it's a great product and frankly it would still hold a lot of stuff but have you not already spent enough and in the Pentium g6951s case we were talking about hyper threading on a dual core chip where it really does make a huge difference to be clear it's normal to bin processors according to their capabilities and then turn around and sell the same silicon at a bunch of different price points in fact around that same time AMD had tri-core processors in their lineup that were just quad core processors with one of the cores disabled the big difference though is that AMD allowed you to play silicon roulette and turn the extra core on sometimes yeah it was unstable the thing really was defective but sometimes you got free real estate good guy AMD enough about ancient history though let's turn our attention back to the paywall du jour ECC memory on Intel's 12th gen CPU most people think it doesn't matter for gaming rigs but do they actually know that or have they just bought into the marketing error correction code or ECC memory is more important than you might think and there's a reason that it's used in servers around the world the difference between these two modules the non-ecc and ecc-1 lies primarily in this extra chip of dram on either side of the stick it acts as a parity check that says hey all of these bits are valid you're good to go before passing data back and forth between the RAM and the CPU we explain this in a bit more depth in our last ECC video but essentially bits can flip spontaneously and cause soft errors like data corruption or crashes if they aren't detected and corrected there are a few factors that affect the soft error rate of memory notable ones include the capacity speed and density all of which will increase the probability of bit flips as they go up and unfortunately for us or fortunately I suppose for our gaming FPS RAM does keep getting bigger faster and denser so perhaps the more relevant study was one done by Google that showed that roughly 32 percent of all servers and eight percent of all dims experienced at least one memory error per year now fortunately for them they were servers and they were using ECC so these errors were caught and corrected before they could bung up your YouTube so so so so so so so clearly there's a valid argument to be made for ECC in modern computers what's the drawback then there are actually a couple first up is that using ECC memory in our system did result in lower Benchmark results across the board compared to regular gaming Ram even running at the same frequency our crucial ballistics Ram managed performance anywhere from the same to as much as 20 percent higher than our safe and stable choice and there's also the small matter of price while they do use the same commodity chips ECC modules legitimately cost more to manufacture than typical dims because of those extra parity chips so this is not just paywall BS with that said we're talking at best a 12 increase in materials cost and as for the performance issue well nothing would actually prevent a memory manufacturer from designing and building higher performance ECC modules in fact mushkin does just that and their pricing is pretty reasonable for them kind of like floatplane.com which has exclusives like this extra footage from the build with my sister the big question then is why aren't we all using ECC and basically it's because Intel decided that consumers either didn't need it or couldn't afford it and artificially locked the feature to their business class products for decades the only real difference now is that it's more obvious now that they've dropped the facade of having parallel Xeon and core branded product lines that use the exact same silicon but have overclocking and ECC support as their main differentiating features however the uncomfortable truth is that Intel really isn't that wrong about this most consumer desktops are far more likely to crash because of a Windows update or a driver error Than A Memory bit flip and consumers have shown time and time again that they would rather save a buck than invest in Mission critical features like redundant power supplies and ECC which raises a pretty important question are paywalls actually a better solution Intel showed us a special motherboard in their Testing Lab that could have its chipset ID reconfigured on the Fly and if you could just change your mind and you wanted to overclocking support a year later wouldn't it be kinda awesome to add the K designation after the fact I mean if only a fraction of the buyers of a product will use a given feature doesn't it kind of make sense that they should be the ones to pay for it even if the cost is disproportionately high this is the defense that I usually see for Tesla's heated rear seat option in the model 3. it simplifies manufacturing to just put it in every car they say and that way only the people who buy it end up covering the cost allowing Tesla to hit a more aggressive base model price point for everyone else so who cares they say well I do just because a decision makes business sense doesn't mean that we should lie down and take it if it is actually a negligible cost to the point where they're just going to put the seat heating Hardware in every single car it is then it should just be active on a forty thousand dollar car just like ECC should be active on my 500 CPU and that's without requiring an additional couple hundred bucks for the arbitrary workstation board that to its credit worked well in our testing but is missing features that I might care about as a consumer like better IO better vrms or even aesthetic gimmicks like RGB lighting headers the very worst part of all of this is that AMD has already shown Intel the path forward Intel just refuses to take it for years AMD has taken actually a very similar stance that ECC is a workstation and server class feature that general consumers probably don't need they only validate it on their professional products the difference is that like that third core unlocking situation they haven't outright disabled the function on their consumer CPUs and chipsets this allows their ecosystem Partners like motherboard makers to activate it should they choose and this is the best of both worlds because it gives businesses a validated solution one that they will pay extra for AMD server CPU sales are clearly doing just fine while still giving consumers the choice to Save A Buck or seek out an ECC compatible motherboard and ECC Ram whether it's because they're sticklers for stability or because they are repurposing their gaming CPU years down the line as a home storage server which has a clear E-Waste reduction benefit the ECC controversy though is arguably coming to a close now that we're moving on to ddr5 which contains eight ECC bits per Channel but my main point here is not the ECC memory my main point is that there are many examples of this practice of locking performance or features behind additional paywalls be it GPU driver features or overclocking support and as consumers we should be thinking long and hard about whether it's something that we actually want before we stop making noise and just accept it like you accept the segue to our sponsor jackery jackery makes solar ready portable power stations designed to improve outdoor Life by providing power Outdoors whenever and wherever you need it the new solar generator 1000 Pro is their fastest solar and wall recharging generator yet boasting three times faster charging than the normal sg-1000 it consists of a jackery Explorer 1000 Pro portable power station and 80 watt solar panels plug it into the wall and get a full charge in under two hours and deliver up to 100 watts of power thanks to the two 100 watt power delivery ports you can plug stuff into this thing check out the new jackery solar generator 1000 pro at the link below thanks for watching if you liked this video check out the one where we talked about Microsoft's dirty practices and that whole Internet Explorer debaclethe way I see it if you want to use the heated seats in your car you should just pay extra to activate them high beam assist just twist the iDrive dial after swiping your credit card in the convenient little reader down here I mean don't get me wrong I know this stuff was already in the car you paid for I just love the convenience of unlocking things later for more money thanks Big Otto said no one ever but at least when it comes to cars the only hurdle is the paywall Intel on the other hand has sort of been doing this for years except worse because in order to get access to those hidden features in your CPU you often need to buy outright different Hardware up front with no way to unlock them after the fact in today's case we want access to that sweet sweet ECC or error correcting memory that will give our 12th gen core processor an extra stability boost but we cannot has it unless we buy their special workstation grade motherboard with the w680 chipset which is like what 500 for a motherboard thing better be very special and very worth it like our sponsor build Redux build Redux makes it easy to configure your new build with support guides to help along the way they also offer competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself so head to build redux.com Linus and start your new build today this little guy is really cool it's got the ability to use either regular unbuffered memory modules or ECC modules but only if you shell out anywhere from two to three hundred dollars more for a w680 chipset motherboard in our case the gigabyte mw34-sp0 but why this consumer grade board has the exact same CPU socket with the same copper traces connected to the same ddr4 dim slots and as The Savvy among you will know the memory controller is baked right into the CPU these days not the motherboard chipset so how is it that a motherboard could prevent you from taking this stick of ECC RAM and putting it into a z690 board the answer is Intel Intel prevents you and unfortunately this isn't exactly a new business practice from them let's take a little trip down memory lane to 2010 and the first upgradeable Intel processor the Pentium g6951 nice out of the box it was a two core two-thread desktop chip with three megabytes of level 3 cash pretty pedestrian even for the time but the big selling feature was that for an extra 50 bucks you could upgrade both the Chip's cash and hyper threading capabilities turning it into a g6952 even nicer now some of you might be thinking well hey that's kind of great isn't it I can save a buck today and then I can upgrade it later without tearing apart my PC or taking it to the Geek Squad and you're right seriously for many people I could actually see this kind of after the fact upgradeability being not only a non-issue but even a good thing but I'm not most people let's go back to cars for a moment many of them have Governors or limiters that cap their maximum speed and these days they're typically way higher than you should ever drive on a public road for example in the UK most cars are limited to about 155 miles per hour so most people are pretty indifferent to them but I also understand the car enthusiasts who feel like well damn it if I paid for the whole speedometer then I should be allowed to use it you even if it is only on track days and that's exactly how I feel about Electronics if it was already Factory validated to handle the additional strain whether it's a clock speed Target or a feature then darn it it should be accessible I mean imagine this in other Industries you buy a backpack from lttstore.com and half the pockets won't open until you send us another micropayment I mean to be clear it's a great product and frankly it would still hold a lot of stuff but have you not already spent enough and in the Pentium g6951s case we were talking about hyper threading on a dual core chip where it really does make a huge difference to be clear it's normal to bin processors according to their capabilities and then turn around and sell the same silicon at a bunch of different price points in fact around that same time AMD had tri-core processors in their lineup that were just quad core processors with one of the cores disabled the big difference though is that AMD allowed you to play silicon roulette and turn the extra core on sometimes yeah it was unstable the thing really was defective but sometimes you got free real estate good guy AMD enough about ancient history though let's turn our attention back to the paywall du jour ECC memory on Intel's 12th gen CPU most people think it doesn't matter for gaming rigs but do they actually know that or have they just bought into the marketing error correction code or ECC memory is more important than you might think and there's a reason that it's used in servers around the world the difference between these two modules the non-ecc and ecc-1 lies primarily in this extra chip of dram on either side of the stick it acts as a parity check that says hey all of these bits are valid you're good to go before passing data back and forth between the RAM and the CPU we explain this in a bit more depth in our last ECC video but essentially bits can flip spontaneously and cause soft errors like data corruption or crashes if they aren't detected and corrected there are a few factors that affect the soft error rate of memory notable ones include the capacity speed and density all of which will increase the probability of bit flips as they go up and unfortunately for us or fortunately I suppose for our gaming FPS RAM does keep getting bigger faster and denser so perhaps the more relevant study was one done by Google that showed that roughly 32 percent of all servers and eight percent of all dims experienced at least one memory error per year now fortunately for them they were servers and they were using ECC so these errors were caught and corrected before they could bung up your YouTube so so so so so so so clearly there's a valid argument to be made for ECC in modern computers what's the drawback then there are actually a couple first up is that using ECC memory in our system did result in lower Benchmark results across the board compared to regular gaming Ram even running at the same frequency our crucial ballistics Ram managed performance anywhere from the same to as much as 20 percent higher than our safe and stable choice and there's also the small matter of price while they do use the same commodity chips ECC modules legitimately cost more to manufacture than typical dims because of those extra parity chips so this is not just paywall BS with that said we're talking at best a 12 increase in materials cost and as for the performance issue well nothing would actually prevent a memory manufacturer from designing and building higher performance ECC modules in fact mushkin does just that and their pricing is pretty reasonable for them kind of like floatplane.com which has exclusives like this extra footage from the build with my sister the big question then is why aren't we all using ECC and basically it's because Intel decided that consumers either didn't need it or couldn't afford it and artificially locked the feature to their business class products for decades the only real difference now is that it's more obvious now that they've dropped the facade of having parallel Xeon and core branded product lines that use the exact same silicon but have overclocking and ECC support as their main differentiating features however the uncomfortable truth is that Intel really isn't that wrong about this most consumer desktops are far more likely to crash because of a Windows update or a driver error Than A Memory bit flip and consumers have shown time and time again that they would rather save a buck than invest in Mission critical features like redundant power supplies and ECC which raises a pretty important question are paywalls actually a better solution Intel showed us a special motherboard in their Testing Lab that could have its chipset ID reconfigured on the Fly and if you could just change your mind and you wanted to overclocking support a year later wouldn't it be kinda awesome to add the K designation after the fact I mean if only a fraction of the buyers of a product will use a given feature doesn't it kind of make sense that they should be the ones to pay for it even if the cost is disproportionately high this is the defense that I usually see for Tesla's heated rear seat option in the model 3. it simplifies manufacturing to just put it in every car they say and that way only the people who buy it end up covering the cost allowing Tesla to hit a more aggressive base model price point for everyone else so who cares they say well I do just because a decision makes business sense doesn't mean that we should lie down and take it if it is actually a negligible cost to the point where they're just going to put the seat heating Hardware in every single car it is then it should just be active on a forty thousand dollar car just like ECC should be active on my 500 CPU and that's without requiring an additional couple hundred bucks for the arbitrary workstation board that to its credit worked well in our testing but is missing features that I might care about as a consumer like better IO better vrms or even aesthetic gimmicks like RGB lighting headers the very worst part of all of this is that AMD has already shown Intel the path forward Intel just refuses to take it for years AMD has taken actually a very similar stance that ECC is a workstation and server class feature that general consumers probably don't need they only validate it on their professional products the difference is that like that third core unlocking situation they haven't outright disabled the function on their consumer CPUs and chipsets this allows their ecosystem Partners like motherboard makers to activate it should they choose and this is the best of both worlds because it gives businesses a validated solution one that they will pay extra for AMD server CPU sales are clearly doing just fine while still giving consumers the choice to Save A Buck or seek out an ECC compatible motherboard and ECC Ram whether it's because they're sticklers for stability or because they are repurposing their gaming CPU years down the line as a home storage server which has a clear E-Waste reduction benefit the ECC controversy though is arguably coming to a close now that we're moving on to ddr5 which contains eight ECC bits per Channel but my main point here is not the ECC memory my main point is that there are many examples of this practice of locking performance or features behind additional paywalls be it GPU driver features or overclocking support and as consumers we should be thinking long and hard about whether it's something that we actually want before we stop making noise and just accept it like you accept the segue to our sponsor jackery jackery makes solar ready portable power stations designed to improve outdoor Life by providing power Outdoors whenever and wherever you need it the new solar generator 1000 Pro is their fastest solar and wall recharging generator yet boasting three times faster charging than the normal sg-1000 it consists of a jackery Explorer 1000 Pro portable power station and 80 watt solar panels plug it into the wall and get a full charge in under two hours and deliver up to 100 watts of power thanks to the two 100 watt power delivery ports you can plug stuff into this thing check out the new jackery solar generator 1000 pro at the link below thanks for watching if you liked this video check out the one where we talked about Microsoft's dirty practices and that whole Internet Explorer debacle\n"