I believe this is more about Intel who for probably a decade have sold consumer CPUs with memory controllers capable of using ECC memory but either disabling the feature in the chip, or more recently with Alder Lake, locking the feature behind an enterprise motherboard chipset despite the chipset not being relevant to ECC support.
Having to pay a 20% premium on RAM for the stability of ECC is one thing, having to pay double, triple, or quadruple the system price to disable arbitrary locks is another.
With AMD that limitation is somewhat lifted with normal consumer CPUs and quite a few motherboards having support. Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor availability. Very few manufacturers offer it and it tends to stick to the standard speeds without any of the overclocked-from-factory parts available with ECC. That last bit is strange because ECC is reportedly very good as a validation tool for overclocking builds so it seems like the RGB-lighted market could end up valuing it as a high-end feature too. One of the RAM manufacturers should rebrand ECC to "Extreme Clocking Capacity" and start selling it as a feature to differentiate their RAM from the competition.
> Unfortunately the RAM itself has very poor availability.
That doesn't match up with my experience, even though I've seen it mentioned several times by people as if it's the case.
For example, when I went looking for ECC UDIMM sticks for my Ryzen 5600X build a year or so ago, I went looking at the website of my local computer supplier.
But it's not like theres any kind of availability problem. And the Kingston ram I bought happily overclocked to 3200MHz without any effort on my part. Using an ASRock B550M Pro4 motherboard for reference, if that's useful.
It will depend on where you are. I'm in Europe and it used to be that the usual retailers had no DDR4 ECC options at all. Now there are 1 or 2 available and still no options for DDR5 ECC. Looking at those pages your suppliers seem much better than what I've found so far and yet also have no DDR5 options. Meanwhile DDR5 non-ECC is very broadly available and DDR4 non-ECC has great and mature options.
> That last bit is strange because ECC is reportedly very good as a validation tool for overclocking builds
Well, yes, but it's not the only tool. In practice you'd use some validation software suite to find a reasonable stable configuration and afterwards prey. Overclockers, who rather than spending extra money on a CPU which assuredly delivers requested performance stress their hardware beyond specifications, are least likely to pay for the extra bits.
If non-ecc RAM is good enough for most fault sto only cause noticable problems rarely, its possible to sell slightly less perfect modules than with ecc, where even otherwise unnoticable problems are detected and reported.
The ratio of modules returned to the manufacturer is probably higher for ecc than non-ecc. Unless ecc modules are already better selected than non-ecc at the manufacturer.
Because given the same chips you can push ECC RAM to speeds beyond what non-ECC RAM can do before corrupting. You can push beyond what the chips are capable of and rely on the error correction to keep your system stable.
ECC in common desktops/workstation/servers will correct all single bit errors and detect all 2 bit errors.
So sure you can run dimms every so slightly faster and fix the occasional single bit flip, but even a single double bit flip and an process or your kernel crashes.
Seems much saner to go for a safe, robust, and reliable system at standard clocks in ECC instead of trying to get slightly more performance which increases the chances or errors, corruptions, crashes, and shorter service life.
Having to pay a 20% premium on RAM for the stability of ECC is one thing, having to pay double, triple, or quadruple the system price to disable arbitrary locks is another.