[Schlotkins]

Well, I am going to upgrade my box here very soon and debating whether or not to go with ECC RAM. I understand the concept - I'm just not sure if it's really worth it for my situation. I leave my box on 24 hours a day for Folding@home, but I reboot it once a day to clean everything out. My new box will be something like:

Conroe/AMD 2.6ghz range
4 gigs of RAM
Raptor 15K and another large drive
ATI x1300
Maybe IRAM

I do photoshop stuff for my digital photos, and my big program is Excel and SAS for my finance Ph.D. stuff. So, not sure if the ECC will make much of a difference for me in terms of stability. I figure it's an extra $100 for the motherboard and another $200-250 for the RAM + some performance loss. $350 is a bunch of cash for very minimal improvement.

[Bios24]

I would be very skeptical. My overclocked box runs 24x7 and my up time is up to 30 days with no reboot on XP Pro. I run all sorts of apps and games and everything seems to run smooth. It's all about building it right, testing for stability, and understanding XP.

If you're really that worried and have the extra cash, go for it. But IMHO for a desktop system I'd spend the money elsewhere.

[Internal]

I agree, esp since he says he can reboot his computer at will from the sounds of it.

The only way IMO you could justify buying that ram is if its being bought to make money(or to sustain a modern business etc) in a way a business would buy a server and throw ECC ram, RAId 5, redundent PSU's, redundent NICs etc at it.

[infinitevalence]

as a person who uses both... it does not matter, if your board takes non EEC then just use that, if you have a choice then use non EEC. Unless you need EEC its just not worth the cost IMO. Not for a home computer/folder/home server.