World's fastest ECC RAM?

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19 Jul 2015
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Since not many people are interested in using ECC on desktops, there have historically not been any high-speed ECC UDIMMs available. That improved a little when some manufacturers started selling DDR4 3200 about a year ago. When I found out about it, I immediately went and bought some to replace the anæmic 2666MHz stuff I was using, which was the fastest available when I bought my 1800X.

The RAM is Kingston KSM32ED8/32ME, and this is what the SPD contains:
DDR4-3200-C22-ECC.png

No frivolities like RGB or heat spreaders with these. No XMP profile either - just the really conservative standard JEDEC timings. There are a few other manufacturers making some too, some with different chips but otherwise similar.

Sadly it was a struggle to get it to work even at the default 3200MHz with the 1800X. My new 5950X has no such problems though, running it at 4000MHz quite happily, like this:
DDR4-4000-C24-ECC.png


It's still not very fast, with ECC errors detected when I tried setting all the primary timings to 22. I haven't seen anyone else do any better though.
 
I see it's gone up a bit - it was £150 when I bought it.

I forgot to mention that I did all the testing at 1.35V. While I could probably go higher safely, I don't really want to do that when I'm not actually going to run it at 4GHz normally. I prefer to trade a little performance for better power efficiency.
 
Why are you using those not the normal RAM?
To state the obvious, it's to prevent data from being corrupted. That's something I've come to value more and more over time as the amount and age of data I have stored increases. While I can make backups of it, they are only good if the data being backed up is good. Having run several systems with ECC over the years, I know that errors do occur sometimes, and if they affect some precious data that I then save and I don't notice, it's lost forever.
 
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