Legit Reviews

I'm building a computer to use as a Hyper-V server, among other things. The board I'll be using is a Supermicro X7SBE which supports both ECC and Non-ECC RAM. The board can accomodate up to 8GB of RAM which I will max out. My question is at 8GB, is there any benefit to ECC RAM? No overclocking will be done. Just need solid stable RAM.

Supermicro X7SBE
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
RAIDCore RC5152-08
WD Caviar Black 1TB (at least 3, probably more)

In your own words you said you want "solid stable ram" and ECC is the way to go for servers that must be as stable as they can be. Now if only you were going with SCSI drives too lol

If the price difference and added heat output of the ECC modules aren't a concern, then go with ECC.

Dan

server = ECC memory

The more memory you have the more important ECC is and 8GB is still a fairly large amount of memory. The server that runs this forum database uses 8GB of ECC memory for what it's worth.

Okay. Thanks for the input. ECC memory it is. How much more heat would ECC modules produce?

It's not the cost of the ECC modules that's making me quibble. Heck, I think the difference between the two kits is a measly $4 which is probably less than I'd spend on a value meal. It's just that all other computers I have use DDR2 Non-ECC and I kinda like the idea of having the same type of RAM on all systems. If ECC is better, though, then that's what I'll get.

No SAS drives as they're too expensive for the number of drives I'll be needing. Still trying to figure out how I should handle virtual OS hard disks. Currently undecided on whether to get a separate HDD for each VM or if I should just dump them into the RAID5 storage array.

How much more heat would ECC modules produce?

I'm a little late with this, but just for the record, power consumption of ECC memory is less than 10% higher than non-ECC. There's just 2 additional RAM chips on ECC DIMMs that make the difference, which in reality is marginal. One doesn't have to pay attention to cooling ECC RAM any more than normal memory.

largon wrote:I'm a little late with this, but just for the record, power consumption of ECC memory is less than 10% higher than non-ECC. There's just 2 additional RAM chips on ECC DIMMs that make the difference, which in reality is marginal. One doesn't have to pay attention to cooling ECC RAM any more than normal memory.

Thanks for the info. I know FB-DIMMs are veritable power drains so it's good to know ECC modules don't consume much more energy than regular non-ECC modules. I've seen a build picture where a fan was placed atop the FB-DIMMs and a shroud was built so hot air blowing through the memory would go directly out of the case. I think the guy had 64GB or 128GB installed.

hnzw_rui wrote:

largon wrote:I'm a little late with this, but just for the record, power consumption of ECC memory is less than 10% higher than non-ECC. There's just 2 additional RAM chips on ECC DIMMs that make the difference, which in reality is marginal. One doesn't have to pay attention to cooling ECC RAM any more than normal memory.

Thanks for the info. I know FB-DIMMs are veritable power drains so it's good to know ECC modules don't consume much more energy than regular non-ECC modules. I've seen a build picture where a fan was placed atop the FB-DIMMs and a shroud was built so hot air blowing through the memory would go directly out of the case. I think the guy had 64GB or 128GB installed.

D'oh, that's what I was thinking of with the ridiculous extra heat, FB-DIMMs.

Dan