To ECC Or Not To ECC?

MetaHiro asks: "I'm going to be upgrading my system in a couple of weeks. I've been looking around the net for reviews and/or benchmarks for ECC vs. non-ECC in both speed and whether or not it's worth it to shell out the extra bucks for ECC. I'm also wondering whether or not i should buy PC2100 ECC instead of PC 2700 non-ECC ram or wait until PC2700 ECC becomes available."

Comments

ECC where useful / speed compromise

[j_dot_bomb]

ECC is useless if you are running something like windows 98 which crashes on its own so much anyway - and would bsod on an ECC error. ECC cant work with Celeron only PII, PIII, PIV which also have their own ECC caches. Something like WINNT/2000/XP it is worth it because they have long uptimes. To the poster who bsod with ECC off- turn it on like the other poster said.
ECC in the old PC133 PC100 etc style memory changed the minimum number of wait states you can have (CAS3 instead of CAS2).

ECC is worth having

[Detritus]

I believe ECC is worth having, even if you are not using the computer to run "mission critical" tasks. Memory problems on a computer without parity or ECC can be very difficult to diagnose. The symptoms may look like a flakey operating system or application, not a hardware problem. I had one computer that would only fail when someone ran the FORTRAN compiler. The symptoms looked exactly like a bug in the FORTRAN compiler. It turned out that one of the DRAM chips had a pattern sensitivity problem that was triggered by the image of the FORTRAN compiler. These kinds of problems can be difficult to detect and fix without hardware support. The memory diagnostics in the power-on self-test in the BIOS will detect hard errors, but not more subtle errors.