> From then on I considered people who think you shouldn’t overlock ECC memory to be a bit confused. It’s the only memory you should be overlocking, because it’s the only memory you can prove you don’t have errors.

This attitude is entirely corporate-serving cope from Intel to serve market segmentation. They wanted to trifurcate the market between consumers, business, and enthusiast segments. Critically, lots of business tasks demand ECC for reliability, and business has huge pockets, so that became a business feature. And while Intel was willing to sell product to overclockers[0], they absolutely needed to keep that feature quarantined from consumer and business product lines lest it destroy all their other segmentation.

I suspect they figured a "pro overclocker" SKU with ECC and unlocked multipliers would be about as marketable as Windows Vista Ultimate, i.e. not at all, so like all good marketing drones they played the "Nobody Wants What We Aren't Selling" card and decided to make people think that ECC and overclocking were diametrically supposed.

[0] In practice, if they didn't, they'd all just flock to AMD.

>[0] In practice, if they didn't, they'd all just flock to AMD.

only when AMD had better price/performance, not because of ECC. At best you have a handful of homelabbers that went with AMD for their NAS, but approximately nobody who cares about performance switched to AMD for ECC ram, because ECC ram also tend to be clocked lower. Back in Zen 2/3 days the choice was basically DDR4-3600 without ECC, or DDR4-2400 with ECC.

At the beginning of your comment I was wondering if the "attitude" that was corporate serving was the anti-ECC stance or the pro-ECC stance (based on the full chunk that you quoted). I'm glad that by the end of the comment you were clearly pro ECC.

Any workstation where you are getting serious work done should use ECC