[InternetOfStuff]

> ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested

The Asus Pro X570 ACE (or similar name) explicitly offers ECC support though, not just unofficially.

[paulmd]

Some boards list in the specs, but that's not a guarantee that it's actually working. Previous BIOS revisions can and have silently broken the ECC part of the memory functionality, and nobody at the board companies was testing it so it went out without anybody noticing until a user started a forum thread about it. That was Asrock iirc.

In the case of MSI, those boards reportedly also don't support the ECC reporting function. They will try to correct them but they don't actually report them to the OS. MSI's answer: "wow, sucks to be you". AMD’s answer: “wow, sucks to be you”. That's what you get from "unofficial support", just a halfhearted level of effort all around.

https://hardwarecanucks.com/forum/threads/ecc-memory-amds-ry...

(there are really multiple levels of functionality here, "boots with ECC in non-ECC mode", "corrects ECC silently", and "behaves like a server and reports ECC to the OS or lets you reboot the system". You'll note that nobody ever commits to a particular level of support on AM4 based products...)

Furthermore, AMD doesn't support it at a processor level, so they apply no pressure to the mobo companies to actually test the features they claim they support, nor will they fix it if there is ever a critical functionality bug. An AGESA update could break or remove ECC and welp, sucks to be you, they never advertised that as an actual feature.

That is why I think it is a little ridiculous that people phrase that as "supported". Nobody is validating that it actually works, nobody at AMD will stand behind the feature, and will in fact tell you that they don't support it.

It works, probably, on certain combinations of hardware and BIOS. It is not supported by anyone other than yourself and your own time.

[Reelin]

> Some boards list in the specs, but that's not a guarantee that it's actually working.

You do realize that false advertising is illegal? Of course realistically that would be a very uphill battle to pursue but that doesn't make it legal.

For example my motherboard has built in audio. The board manufacturer makes some fairly vague claims about what precisely that means but it is clear that there are ports on the board and that they will provide some base level of functionality in conjunction with a supported OS. To the best of my knowledge the CPU manufacturer makes absolutely no claims about that feature. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to expect it to work.

Of course it would be nice if AMD required ECC support as part of the platform. Then all the boards would be required to support it and I wouldn't have to bother reading their spec sheets.

> there are really multiple levels of functionality here

This is the real issue. At least historically, some boards "supported" ECC memory to the extent that they could operate with it inserted; they didn't actually do any error correcting though. Of course in the case I'm aware of (MSI) they specifically stated that. If you as a consumer glossed over their claims and missed that, legally that was on you.

Other vendors specifically stated that their boards officially supported actual ECC functionality. It's not safe to assume precisely what that means though (silent vs reported) unless the manufacturer makes an official claim.

[account42]

I don't know about AM4 but my TR4 MSI board definitely does report ECC errors (both corrected and uncorrectable).