• Luna_moonlit@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    You’re paying for ECC memory and certification in tools like autocad and solidworks, this isn’t meant for us

    • TheRealBurritoJ@alien.topB
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      10 months ago

      It has the same physical memory as the consumer cards, it just allows in-band ECC which is a software solution. There is no additional manufacturing cost to including in-band ECC. Nvidia even enables the option on the 4090.

      You’re right that you’re paying for the certifications though.

      • Luna_moonlit@alien.topB
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        10 months ago

        Yeah I thought as much, but you are still paying for it (as well as the extra bit of ram needed to make that work I assume) in that price tag

        • TheRealBurritoJ@alien.topB
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          10 months ago

          Extra RAM would be if they used out-of-band ECC, which is where you use extra physical dies and a wider bus to handle the storage and transmission of parity data.

          These use in-band ECC, which uses the existing memory chips/bus for parity. You have to toggle it in the driver, and with ECC enabled you don’t get the full memory size nor the full bandwidth (you lose 1/8th of each). As far as I’m aware, no GDDR6 GPUs use out-of-band ECC.

          It’s purely a market segmentation thing, there is nothing physically stopping the RX7700 from running the exact same ECC mode as the W7700.

          • Luna_moonlit@alien.topB
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            10 months ago

            Thanks for clearing that up! My assumption was these cards would have a little extra memory so they could hit the 16GB with ECC turned on.

            And yeah, it is just market segmentation but you still have to pay for it unfortunately 🤣🤣