• TheRealBurritoJ@alien.topB
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    1 year 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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      1 year 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 🤣🤣