Sort of - they let mainboard vendors decide whether to support it or not, which means it can be a crapshoot. For example, MSI's been known in the past to kill ECC support with a BIOS update; some vendors have tested that you can use ECC RAM but won't enable any of the error correction (for example, Gigabyte say this in [1]: "non-ECC mode".)
Selfishly I really wish they would make it easier, because I'm in the market for a new personal-use storage machine and I've spent far too long researching all this crap but it's looking like I'll have much more certainty that it'll all just work if I buy a Xeon E3/E-2000 series and that's unfortunate.
Asrock have been good in my experience at enabling all features on their boards. Back when Intel's Vt-d support depended on your board they reliably had support, and I believe they support ECC on all their new AMD boards.
If you’re wanting a storage box usually it’s just less headache to buy used server gear off eBay. Plenty of bays, DDR3 RDIMM’s are cheap, and power efficient ivy/sandy bridge systems are finally in affordable price ranges.
I’m the kind of person that lurks in /r/homelab though - so I’ve also got a 25U rack to keep all my gear. If you want a tower to stuff in a corner things get more dicey.
Don’t populate all 16 DIMM’s unless you need that much memory? Both my single-socket R320 and dual-socket R520 idle at 70W each with 6 DIMM’s installed.
Most people probably don’t need the gobs of memory I have either. A R520 with one socket populated and 2x8 or 16GB dual-ranked RDIMM’s would be more than sufficient.
I actually misspoke. The system above was configured with only 8 DIMMs (8 GB each) at the time. That's the lower limit for this platform before performance is degraded.
Single socket Ivy/Sandy Bridge-EN servers exist and only need three DIMM’s for max performance, that’s what I run FreeNAS on (R320 with a E5-2450L, mind you I have six DIMM’s).
I don't know the hardware details, but as a buyer this is like moving the goalpost.
It was always the CPU that didn't have ECC, but now apparently your whole system has to be designed to be a fancy workstation.
Everybody keeps repeating AMD supports ECC out of the box, but the fact that you will most likely not have an AM4 motherboard which does have ECC enabled is new to me.
