Intel CPUs Don’t Support ECC Memory: How Bad For A/V Quality?

[yamamoto2002]

I read some forum post about ECC DRAM soft error event log. In a datacenter DRAM bit upset is real problem and need to be resolved with ECC. His datacenter, which operates 1000 PCs of 24/7, observes 3 to 5 ECC soft error events (1bit flipped and safely corrected by ECC mechanism) in one month. On this case, ECC memory is must have feature.

 

This means, if you have one PC which is used 8 hours a day sees one ECC error event in 50 years to 83 years of operation.

 

I read somewhere, on March 2011, a datacenter near Fukushima observed more frequent than usual DRAM soft error events, probably due to flying particle from the reactor...

 

If you have Windows computer with ECC DRAM support, be sure to check DRAM periodical scrub  settings of BIOS. Computer generates machine check exception logs when soft error event occurs and ECC error correction event can be viewed on Windows event viewer.

 

IIRC about 15 to 20 years ago Microsoft released some document of their investigation about Blue Screen of Death cause, which says some portion of the kernel crash is caused by uncorrected DRAM bit upset of non-ECC DRAM but I cannot find the article now