should I care about ECC RAM?

[jackb602]

I'll be in the market for a Power Mac Quad G5 soon, and I'll need more than the 512MB of RAM that comes with it. In theory, ECC RAM sounds like a good idea, especially when running long renderings. But does it actually make a difference? I gather that ECC and non-ECC RAM can't be mixed, so I suppose I'll have to remove the 512MB of non-ECC RAM that comes with the machine. If it will give me more stability, I'm willing to pay a bit more for it, but I don't have any real world experience with it. What do you guys think?

 

Jack

[Brolloks]

I don't think you can mix ECC and non-ECC RAM. As for stability I have never had an issue with non-ECC RAM and renderings that can be attributed to the RAM...

[AJLynn]

Don't bother. Just get a good brand of regular memory.

[jackb602]

Thanks for the replies. So far I haven't come across any specific reason that ECC memory would be more reliable. I'm thinking about this because I recently ran in to some major memory related problems running the Windows version of Cinema's Net Render. I think that the real difference is OS X's memory handling, but I just want to cover all my bases.

Jack

[AJLynn]

Yeah, most of the time those problems are caused in software - physical memory faults are pretty rare, and ECC doesn't help you with the OS not managing memory well.