World's fastest ECC RAM?

Associate
Joined
19 Jul 2015
Posts
485
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.
 
Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
Posts
19,909
Not bad if its was £164 for a single 32GB stick but depends how much movement there is in timings, voltage and frequencies.

Have you tried pumping more voltage though it and lowering timings for 2000Mhz to CL16, either than or try it at 3600 CL14 then 3800 CL14


Memory module specification shows the folllowing features

• Power Supply: VDD = 1.2V Typical
• VDDQ = 1.2V Typical
• VPP = 2.5V Typical
• VDDSPD = 2.2V to 3.6V
• Nominal and dynamic on-die termination (ODT) for
data, strobe, and mask signals
• Low-power auto self refresh (LPASR)
• Data bus inversion (DBI) for data bus
• On-die VREFDQ generation and calibration
• Dual-rank
• On-board I2 serial presence-detect (SPD) EEPROM
• Temperature sensor with integrated SPD
• 16 internal banks; 4 groups of 4 banks each
• Fixed burst chop (BC) of 4 and burst length (BL) of 8
via the mode register set (MRS)
• Selectable BC4 or BL8 on-the-fly (OTF)
• Fly-by topology
• Terminated control command and address bus
• PCB: Height 1.23” (31.25mm)
• RoHS Compliant and Halogen-Free
 
Associate
OP
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19 Jul 2015
Posts
485
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.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
19 Jul 2015
Posts
485
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.
 
Soldato
Joined
29 May 2005
Posts
4,899
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.
I get you regarding the old data. I also had issues in the past with data that s years and years old. Though I don’t think ECC will correct that as the data was stored in a non ECC system so adding ECC doesn’t make anything better post that process.

So if you started at square 1 and going to use ECC from day one for all storage then fair enough. But most consumers, ECC ram system for data storage is not common let alone often deployed in homes.

Anyway if you have been running ecc for a while then it makes sense.
 
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