Comment Re:About those motherboards (Score 1) 115
In terms of the value of ECC, there are several components to answering this question. The first thing to note is that DDR4 has error detection and retry for physical trace errors built-in so normal non-ECC DDR4 will be considerably less error-prone than non-ECC DDR3 (or earlier) ever was.
In terms of whether the ECC helps on top of that, the answer basically comes down to a combination of the use-case, amount of memory installed, and uptime.
So, for example, I would never even consider putting non-ECC sticks into a thread-ripper system with loads of memory in it. That's just asking for bit rot to happen. I will always use ECC for any system with lots of storage (it doesn't have to be a NAS). For example, my home server. The last thing I want is for a large multi-terabyte filesystem to become corrupted because machine memory got hit by a cosmic ray.
But, say, my two primary desktop systems, which I only use for chrome, xterms, games, and stuff like that, do not have ECC in them. Most of my test boxes do not either. The kitchen machine we use to lookup recipes doesn't either.
The nice thing about ECC in a modern AMD machine is that it 'just works'. You still have to use the right kind of course. Ryzen and Threadripper take unbuffered DIMMs while EPYC takes registered DIMMs.
-Matt