How to get activated ECC on Gigabyte B450 Board?

General Discussion
1

Im trying to get an active ECC error correction working on my

Ryzen 3600

B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI (Rev. 1.0)

SK Hynix HMA82GU7CJR8N - VK T0 AD 1922 2x 16GB DDR4-2666 ECC UDIMM

Windows 11

I have asked the Gigabyte Support and they gave me an answer, which a discussion with the AI later, I’m not sure if the AI is gaslighting me or is correct by insisting on Gigabyte means only that the compatibility but not the active function is meant, when having a PRO CPU.

Gigabyte Support answer:

  1. **If you want an ECC-protected system:**You must buy both:

    • ECC UDIMM memory modules(1Rx8/2Rx8).

    • AnAMD PRO-series CPU(e.g., Ryzen 5 PRO 5650G, Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G, etc.).

  2. **If you use a standard CPU (e.g., Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 7800X3D):**You can still install the ECC memory sticks for compatibility, but they will function as more expensive regular RAM. The ECC feature will be inactive.

What to believe? Would ECC be active when i get a PRO CPU? Would other CPU’s like the 5700x work, that have ECC compatibility in their spec sheet?

Btw the AI brought me here, using some discussions as sources.

I appreciate your help

2

Never trust an AI.

Ryzen PRO for ECC goes for APUs. Most CPUs, including your 3600, unofficially support ECC. So you have nothing to do… but whether ECC is actually active depends on what Gigabyte did with the BIOS of your board.
This being a relatively old board with an equally old CPU, all bets are off.

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3

@etorix Thank you for confirming, that it should work on my 3600, this also was the information I had found, but when initially checking, it was not active, but AI’s fault.

In todays seach I found this “Get-CimInstance Win32_PhysicalMemoryArray | Select MemoryErrorCorrection” and it shows 6 on my system, so Multi Bit Correction should be active, right?

AI continues being a mess, it gave me a somewhat similar line for checking if i get the output 6, but seemingly the wrong one. And now that I correct it, it still insists on, that my system only potentially got error correcting active, but not for sure… AI often really is not a help and only being useful in topics, where the user already knows enough about it already, to know what answers can be right and which ones not.

4

If you put on a usb thumb memtest, and run it, you will see immediately if system is using or not ECC.
Also when some time ago i was struggling to understand if ECC was working or not, from TN itself, i used

dmidecode -t memory

and searched for this line

Physical Memory Array
        ...
        Error Correction Type: ****
        ...
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5

It is enabled on my system when checking in memtest. So im good now.

Thanks for helping out and have a great day!

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