Ryzen 9 9900X build with true ECC?

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Hi all,

I am building a new homelab ‘server’ and the current parts I have are:

  1. Ryzen 9 9900X
  2. Asrock 870E Nova (pending delivery)
  3. A bunch of SAS SSDs which I can get working with some PCIe SAS Controller from eBay

Now I am wondering whether it’s possible to get true ECC on the 9900X/870E Nova combo. Or am I overthinking the whole requirement for ‘true’ ECC? Is on-die ECC sufficient and therefore I go with any good DDR5 memory?

I’m planning to run a few things on this system:

  • Home automation
  • Media server (jellyfin, arr stack)
  • Other low-med utilisation VMs (VPN)
  • VM for gaming (VR), so I will throw in a GPU at some point

Appreciate your time and effort!

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  • Dual Channel DDR5 Memory Technology
  • 4 x DDR5 DIMM Slots
  • Supports DDR5 ECC/non-ECC, un-buffered memory up to 8200+(OC)*
  • Max. capacity of system memory: 256GB
  • Supports Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) and EXTended Profiles for Overclocking (EXPO) memory modules

Someone confirmed that the board works with ECC.

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If by true ECC you mean bus EC4, yes. Though if you can find and afford EC4 UDIMMs at the moment that would be fairly impressive.

Depends on your purposes but DDR5’s ODEC2 + rwCRC substantially overlaps with EC4 and, in some ways, significantly exceeds it. So… typically more likely yes than no.

We have essentially this thread on a regular basis and the EC4 value proposition basically comes down to how you want to put effort into monitoring and importance of edge case coverage.

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on die ECC is just a necessity, because DDR5 is so bad.
This isn’t real ECC.

If you need real ECC is up to you. I like it for VMs and Storage. Or to quote Linus Torvalds in a recent interview with Linus Tech Tips from my memory:
I wasted 3 days thinking I have an error in my kernel, because of a RAM issue. No way I will ever get a none ECC host again.

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I wish I had completed that order on the UDIMM I had my eyes on last month :smiling_face_with_tear:

Thank you all for your input, extremely valuable!

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