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Looking at setting up a SOHO server with a C236 Chipset and ECC RAM and wondering about the CPU to use.

Skylake Pentiums (e.g., the G4400) support ECC, but prior to Kaby Lake's release, news outlets reported that ECC support was removed.

Looking at Intel's ARK for e.g., the Pentium G4600, ECC is listed as supported, but ARK has been wrong before.

Does anyone know for sure if the Kaby Lake Pentiums support ECC RAM?

Michael Stum
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  • @JacobEvans The CPU, Mainboard and BIOS all need to support it. The C236 chipset does, though some mainboards do limit it to Xeon only. Xeons do support ECC, Core i3/i5/i7 do not, and Skylake Pentiums do if the Mainboard BIOS supports it. For Kaby Lake, I've seen conflicting information saying that the CPU doesn't support it, but ARK says they do. Hence wondering if someone has tried setting up a Kaby Lake Pentium ECC system. – Michael Stum Apr 09 '17 at 16:58
  • If the CPU does actually support it, then it becomes a hunt for a Mainboard that supports it on Pentiums, but if the CPU doesn't support it at all (like the Core i's), then no mainboard will work – Michael Stum Apr 09 '17 at 17:04
  • @jacobevans the processor​ absolutely has to support ECC specifically. In addition to motherboard. – d hee Jan 12 '18 at 19:07

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After researching this for a while, I can't come to any concrete conclusions, but I can make some strong inferences.

The techreport article you link to seems to be the only place reporting the lack of ECC ram. Everything else that I can find that references it, stems back to that article. But that article is unsourced and as far as I can tell, unverified.

I would believe ARK over an article of unknown journalistic quality.

All that said and done, ask yourself "Do I really need ECC for a home server?" - take for example this 2015 article from our co-founder and former overlord. I don't always agree with all of the server/hardware decisions Jeff has made/posted in the past, but I can't deny that in this case he seems to have done some pretty thorough homework.

Mark Henderson
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  • Thanks. Interesting posting - I guess I wouldn't really care for ECC on a webserver or any other server that doesn't really hold any data. The server I'm looking to build is going to be a file/backup server, hence I'd prefer ECC. I might just try it out at some point, I need to build a server running a Xeon E3 v6 anyway soon, can as well order a Pentium as well and try it. – Michael Stum Apr 10 '17 at 07:55
  • ECC is very important. I had errors compiling because of old memory that went bad. I would have never thought to check memory. – d hee Jan 12 '18 at 19:09