What's Up With Error Correcting Memory on AM5 in 2024?

SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS THE GREASE: gigabyte aorus elite ax working now with f30 bios, see wendells tweet. Go team!! x.com/tekwendell/status/1806160769723076873

I hope that complete ECC memory support will someday become a standard feature everywhere. Reminder: Regular DDR5’s On-Die ECC is just a tool to be able to use lower quality DRAM ICs that would otherwise have been discarded, it has nothing to do with the complete ECC chain checking the data between the DIMMs and the CPU’s memory controller.

Slight error at 6:05: DDR5 on-die ECC has no ability to correct in-flight errors, only those that happen inside the memory chip.

Registered ECC should be the standard for all computing today. The fact that JEDEC member companies still view security and data integrity as premium features for only certain classes of consumers is a total ethical failure.

13:10 Has anyone seen 64 GB per DIMM unbuffered memory in the wild, yet? It’s been half a year since motherboard manufacturers qualified these sticks (Kingston modules with Micron DRAM ICs).

You may be the first to directly say: these are renamed ryzens. While it seems a bit obvious, it has been surprising how many either just ignore that or tip toe their way around the issue. See tech tech potato, geerling, etc... Also, the low end epyc 8004, though a bit of a pain to get a hold of, isn't a massive amount more than a ryzen/epyc 4004 setup, except it has all the pcie lanes and other server must haves you could want. Also lower power depending on the chip.

15:01 imho that's not enabled, I get that with non-pro APUs on AM4 too. When ECC is actually enabled it should show the DIMMs in dmesg, like this where there are 2x 16gb sticks and 2x 8gb sticks mounted sudo dmesg | grep EDAC [ 0.462287] EDAC MC: Ver: 3.0.0 [ 181.059288] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module amd64_edac controller F17h_M10h: DEV 0000:00:18.3 (INTERRUPT) [ 181.059295] EDAC amd64: F17h_M10h detected (node 0). [ 181.059300] EDAC MC: UMC0 chip selects: [ 181.059302] EDAC amd64: MC: 0: 8192MB 1: 8192MB [ 181.059304] EDAC amd64: MC: 2: 4096MB 3: 4096MB [ 181.059310] EDAC MC: UMC1 chip selects: [ 181.059311] EDAC amd64: MC: 0: 8192MB 1: 8192MB [ 181.059313] EDAC amd64: MC: 2: 4096MB 3: 4096MB

I love that all of these combinations are possible in 2024. However the reality of the ECC UDIMM market is that any savings you make, you pay for in ridiculous sticker shock and compromised halfway features like only half your DIMM slots populated, etc. I went with a used Milan CPU and a new RomeD8-2T mobo last year, and I'm still pretty tickled with it. I got 256GB of 3200 DDR4 RDIMMs for $381. I can barely get 64GB of DDR5 ECC UDIMMS for that price...

I got the X570D4i second hand some years ago, while the firmware and bmc are kinda buggy, I've never had better customer support for something I don't even have the receipt for. They've walked me through testing my ECC SODIMMs (even sending them to Taiwan for me) and talking to kingston to add a note that some specific model didn't work on Zen 2. I highly recommend them! Only sad thing is that the APU models (useful for lower power consumption) need to be the PRO version, otherwise the Unregistered DIMMs don't work...

Thank you! I've been trying to figure this stuff out, and it had all been such scattered info I had given up.

Why in 2024 is all memory not ECC? I mean its not that much extra cost to have un buffered ECC. EDIT: Honestly if you are doing anything more advanced than throwing a GPU and RGB in use ASRock. I dont honestly get the hate, every time i have contacted them for strange none standard requests they have been more than happy to help. Contrast that with MSI, all i asked them was for the location and model number of the fan controller on the PCB on my X99 motherboard and they would not even try to ask the back office for a simple service request. I know its out of support , i know it was me that exploded the fan controller but just please at least try to ask dev for the info, how will this hurt you?

love the classic OD Green motherboards! Glad to hear about AM5 and ECC. I'm still rocking DDR3 ECC on my old 4th gen Intel fileserver

YES, looking forward to the info on the new chipset boards incoming! THANK YOU!

Great video!

> Yes, you can get 64 gig DIMMs No you can't, they don't exist anywhere for sale and no manufacturer lists them anywhere. I'm aware they exist in the lab but they're not for sale.

>AM4 works for home servers Me still using a Sandybridge i5 for my home server in 2024

So in short ECC on a Ryzen platform is still hit or miss. Disappointing

Thank you so much for this video since I am actually at the moment choosing parts for home server based on AM5

One other shortcoming of on-die ECC is that it is only single-error correcting (SEC) and not dual-error detecting (not DED). For performance reasons a Hamming code is used, with 8 check bits protecting 128 information bits. Nine bits are required to detect all the double-bit errors, so approximately half of the double errors go undetected. This is why it's critical to have host support that scrubs the memory and corrects single errors before they accumulate and become undetectable double errors.

I'd only gone for AM5 two months ago, trying to surf one of those slightly more budget friendly waves shortly before the next big one. And boy was I knocked off the board by just how bad 2DPC is working with DDR5! The original IBM PC had parity RAM, never quite lost that primal fear of a bit flip since, even if I never observed any on the 64k it launched with. At a billion bits (128GB) I just feel better spending that little extra to ban and eliminate it from that large list of things that can go wrong in computers that require binary precision all the time. Only to find that what was trivial on AM4 with DDR4-3200 ECC was impossible to make work with DDR5 on AM5: I had completely missed months if not more than a year of tragedies from people who had tried and floundered. In the end I went with 96GB of DDR5-5600 1DPC ECC for a 128GB DDR5-5600 2DPC price, which isn't how I imagined progress, but at least worked just fine even at DDR5-6000 (ECC). 7950X3D finally gets me with an RTX 4090 where 5950X didn't quite: 4k gaming that just works without having to spend more time on tuning the game than gaming itself. I swear: no upgrades for years now, because you cheated on delivering real improvements on every angle and that's just not nice. And 240 FPS make no sense when my reaction time has dropped to half my age.