ECC RAM vs non-ECC RAM for gaming: ECC won't hurt FPS, but it's not worth the premium for pure gaming

The performance overhead from ECC is tiny—1-2% in synthetic benchmarks, basically zero in real gaming. Your GPU is the bottleneck, not memory error checking. The real cost is the premium for ECC sticks and compatible motherboards. If you already have ECC hardware from a workstation, keep it; if building for gaming only, skip ECC because it’s more expensive and not worth the hassle.