Mac Pro vs. Hackintosh

[FluJunkie]

Originally Posted by Tesselator

Semantically, for me, ECC is also part of the "Workstation" spec. and definition.

Indeed. Without ECC, you just built a fast machine. Which is fine, but it's not what I'd consider a workstation.

[Zaap]

I couldn't care less about ECC RAM. It's no mystery to those of us that use both. I use a MacPro at work, and a Hackintosh at home. The Hackintosh is faster, gets projects done quicker, therefore makes me more money. ECC RAM on the machine at work doesn't mean buttkiss in the above equation.

There's probably some scientific application where it may make a big difference, but with desktop apps doing most tasks you're going to be doing on a Mac (video editing, photo editing, etc.) there's nothing magical about ECC memory. People make it sound like normal fast RAM will corrupt all your data and crash your machine and erase what you're working on every 5 minutes, but of course we all know that's not the case at all.

[Tesselator]

I use and have used both for as long as ECC has existed.

Presently ECC is only about 2% slower in the worst case. That's from both hard-core benchmarking and manufacturer blurbs.

While it's not as bad as your bottom paragraph describes it actually can be. Where I'm located I probably see a data glitch on average, every month or two. No one can determine for certain if the occasional system crash is due to bit-flipping errors or not tho so I won't even venture to guess - and even the ECC systems do that. I see corruption in data-streams tho and the longer it's in RAM the more apt I am to encounter it. Once glitched it will save out that way too - or crash trying. Also when DL'ing large files via torrent or more direct protocols on a non-ECC machine every so often I have to redownload it because it's corrupt. I never ever see these kinds of errors on my ECC systems. A very long running coincidence? Possibly, I kinda doubt it tho. Especially when industry experts and computer scientists say essentially the same thing regarding ECC vs. Non-ECC system integrity.

Where I lived in the USA previously, it was less often but densities were a lot lower back then too and dem der science types say that matters quite a lot. I guess more than half of noticing this difference is just bothering to notice. I mean if a data glitch is seen and ignored or repaired instead of reloaded (or whatever) then the user might not even think to consider it was due to the lack of ECC. Ya know...?