Item — HN Reader

(2023) "AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Performance With ECC DDR5 Memory"

https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen9-ddr5-ecc

"When plotting the benchmarks with a statistically significant difference, there was just a handful of benchmarks within the 2~3% faster range when ECC was disabled. As shown earlier, the Graph500 HPC benchmark was the outlier with a ~8% difference toggling ECC. PostgreSQL and Hadoop were among the few real-world workloads with the 2~3% difference, which is a small price to pay for the benefits of ECC. It's great that the desktop AMD Ryzen processors continue to support ECC memory while still it's ultimately up to the motherboard vendors whether ECC is to be supported. We're at least seeing more AMD Ryzen motherboards come to market with a server focus which in turn is great for allowing more motherboard options with ECC memory support. My testing with the ASRock Rack 1U4LW-B650/2L2T 1U server (ASRockRack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM motherboard) continues working out very well and hasn't yielded any platform troubles with all of my hundreds of hours of Linux testing thus far."

1 comments

I have one of these ASRock Rack servers, and I can confirm ECC works on it - I have 128GB of ECC DDR5 with a Ryzen 9 7900.

I wish more motherboards bothered to validate ECC working - it's a nice benefit in an affordable platform.

> I can confirm ECC works on it

"It works" as in it boots, or "it works" as in it checks and reports single-bit errors and reports double-bit errors?

What OS? If Linux, are you using rasdaemon? Does it confirm that the appropriate EDAC drivers are loaded and working?

Or is that data only available in the BMC's event log?

Fault injection has been used successfully and people have introduced manual errors that do get flagged - eg https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=24901&PID=10365...

For Linux support you need a very recent kernel - I forget how recent, but some reporting on it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-EDAC-Ryzen-7000-Series

Running azrock mb with a ryzen 9 3900x and Samsung b die ram… it’s pile of crap compared to asus mobo with the same plugins… ecc, I don’t know… what’s a proper ecc test today and is it worth sacrificing 12% in performance?

I tested that ECC was working on my Zen 3 + ASRock B550 setup by gradually undervolting the RAM more and more, and running Memtester[0] each time until Linux reported corrected errors.

[0] https://pyropus.ca./software/memtester/

Normal Asrock Ryzen 5xxx motherboards also supported ECC, I used ECC RAM for my homesever with a normal 5900X and a Asrock B650M Pro4 motherboard.

The new Asrock Ryzen 7xxx motherboards unfortunately don't have that same ECC support.