Motherboard for Ryzen (3rd and 4th gen) with ECC?

[nukem492]

Upgrading my build from an ancient AMD Athlon 64 X2... Picked up a Ryzen 7 2700X, and intend to eventually upgrade to a 4th gen Ryzen.  So I was thinking to get an X570 board.  I really want to use ECC, mainly to help preserve my hundreds of thousands of family photos/videos.  

 

This thread seems pretty conclusive that ECC either doesn't work at all, or at least the detection/reporting doesn't: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/88613-is-ecc-working-on-x570-unraid/?tab=comments#comment-822702

 

I may also want to try for GPU pass-through to make this a streaming gaming rig.

 

Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions?

Edited April 1, 2020 by nukem492

[D'n'S137]

I'm on the same Journey.
In case of gaming you may better do not use ECC. And also ECC is very expensive. You have to know that ECC is not equal ECC, there are different technologies if you insist, just get an AMD EPYC CPU with a good mainboard or you might have to use a Xenon CPU but both options are on the pricey side.

 

If you want to get a good UNRAID system for Gaming you have to look for Virtualization and IOMMU(AMD-Vi), for both CPU and MAINBOARD.

Ryzen 7 2700x is capable of IOMMU.

[zeus83]

Hi, I'm running a Ryzen build on Asus ROG Crosshair Hero VIII X570 chipset. I initially had ECC memory and had no issues with it, however I can't prove if it correct errors or not. 

 

ECC I used wasn't expensive at all compared to OC memory for gamers, but the thing is that only unbuffered ECC is supported and not many manufacturers offers it. And you'll be limited to stock frequency 2666Mhz that means your Ryzen infinity bus will run at 1333 which means worse performance.

 

I then switched to Kingston DDR4 32Gb (2x16Gb) 3466 MHz pc-27700 HyperX FURY Black . My gaming VM benchmarks merely showed 1-2 FPS improvement . So you can easily game on ECC as well.

[D'n'S137]

On 4/6/2020 at 4:23 PM, zeus83 said:

Hi, I'm running a Ryzen build on Asus ROG Crosshair Hero VIII X570 chipset. I initially had ECC memory and had no issues with it, however I can't prove if it correct errors or not. 

 

ECC I used wasn't expensive at all compared to OC memory for gamers, but the thing is that only unbuffered ECC is supported and not many manufacturers offers it. And you'll be limited to stock frequency 2666Mhz that means your Ryzen infinity bus will run at 1333 which means worse performance.

 

I then switched to Kingston DDR4 32Gb (2x16Gb) 3466 MHz pc-27700 HyperX FURY Black . My gaming VM benchmarks merely showed 1-2 FPS improvement . So you can easily game on ECC as well.

So you can create a Memtest Stick and boot your hardware from it it should show at least if your RAM is capable of ECC but not the ECC-Mode.

 

You can also ran 

dmidecode -t memory

there should be an Output with informations about ECC like:

Error Correction Type: Single-bit ECC

so in this case the ECC is active. But only in Single-bit Mode like on most consumer grade Hardware...

[D'n'S137]

On 4/1/2020 at 3:19 AM, nukem492 said:

Upgrading my build from an ancient AMD Athlon 64 X2... Picked up a Ryzen 7 2700X, and intend to eventually upgrade to a 4th gen Ryzen.  So I was thinking to get an X570 board.  I really want to use ECC, mainly to help preserve my hundreds of thousands of family photos/videos.  

 

This thread seems pretty conclusive that ECC either doesn't work at all, or at least the detection/reporting doesn't: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/88613-is-ecc-working-on-x570-unraid/?tab=comments#comment-822702

 

I may also want to try for GPU pass-through to make this a streaming gaming rig.

 

Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions?

If your willing to better preserve your family-data just get more parity. To be really safe think about an offsite Backup like a portable HDD or an cloud storage where you upload automatic, every 2 weeks, your most important photos/videos.

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, D'n'S137 said:

If your willing to better preserve your family-data just get more parity.

Not sure what you are saying here. Parity as implemented in Unraid only recreates a missing or failed disk, it doesn't back up anything. Important data must exist in multiple physical locations and not be effected by issues with a single system. True backups are some form of

2 hours ago, D'n'S137 said:

offsite Backup like a portable HDD or an cloud storage where you upload automatic, every 2 weeks, your most important photos/videos.

Parity is much less important than real backups, and most of the time money spent on a second parity drive would be much better allocated to a real backup.

[D'n'S137]

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

Not sure what you are saying here. Parity as implemented in Unraid only recreates a missing or failed disk, it doesn't back up anything. Important data must exist in multiple physical locations and not be effected by issues with a single system. True backups are some form of

Parity is much less important than real backups, and most of the time money spent on a second parity drive would be much better allocated to a real backup.

"more parity" = "more parity drives"

Edited April 14, 2020 by D'n'S137

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, D'n'S137 said:

"more parity" = "more parity drives"

 

2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

money spent on a second parity drive would be much better allocated to a real backup

 

Unless you already have a robust 3 location backup (original, copy on another piece of equipment, offsite), don't bother with 2nd parity.