ECC RAM on AMD Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs

ECC support has been standard on Ryzen processors, but with the recent introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series and the new AM5 socket, any mention of ECC was dropped from specification pages and similar documentation. It turns out, though, that there's more to this story.

A couple months ago I came across a topic on the ASRock forums talking about ECC support on AM5 motherboards, in which a user called ApplesOfEpicness said that they'd worked with an AMD engineer to get ECC RAM going within AMD's AGESA firmware. They'd claimed to have tested it on an ASRock motherboard with an updated UEFI, by shorting ground and data pins, and seeing errors be reported up to the OS.

I was intrigued by this! Even though I didn't have the same motherboard that ApplesOfEpicness did, I had chosen an ASRock board (the B650E PG Riptide)-I had figured that if ECC was possible on any AM5 board at all, it would be supported on ASRock. So based on the forum post, last week I ordered a pair of 32 GB server-grade ECC sticks from v-color.

I updated my motherboard's UEFI to the latest version (version 1.28 with AGESA 1.0.0.7b), and then replaced my existing RAM with the new sticks. I started up the system, and after a very long link training process... it booted up!

It boots, but does it actually work? This may seem like a simple question to answer, but it turns out it's a lot harder to verify working ECC than you might think. Excellent investigative work by the author, Rain.