How much more expensive is ECC ram? I don't have it and I've never experienced obvious issues, if it's a lot more expensive it's not really worth it for the once or twice the desktop will likely experience an actual issue
Should be about 1/8th more since it's just a 72-bit bus for carrying 64-bits data and 8-bits check. Or rather, your dimm will have 9 chips instead of 8.
How they get you is Intel will sell you a xeon which is the exact same die as an i5 in a different package for more money.
Depends what you need - you can pick up older gen Xeon chips for cheap and the performance often isn't that much worse than modern consumer grade stuff. If you're looking to build a consumer-level NAS or home server, Avoton is pretty cheap and takes ECC RAM.
Should we do a Kickstarter to manufacture our own DIMMs? Its an easy design and I hate donating to some corporate gross margins. Maybe enough people feel the same.
It's significantly more expensive, usually around 30-100% more, depending on capacity. IMO not worth it on a desktop, possibly worth it on a home server or a serious workstation. Plus your CPU and motherboard has to support it, which is a pain with Intel's consumer lineup.
I think I may go AMD (again) for this very reason.
(Generally, I don't think ECC actually does matter that much for us casual/home users, but I like to reward the people who actually do make it easy to "do the right thing". Same deal as only purchasing AMD graphics cards since 2005-ish(?).)
usually its cheaper because of server market forced upgrade cycle surplus. Problem is its mostly Buffered/Registered ECC which cant be used in desktop motherboards.
