For a while now I’ve wondered how to build the most stable gaming/workstation possible. I’m sick of crashes, stutters, and general un-reliability. However, it’s a balancing act between price, performance, and reliability. (for example ECC memory is stable, but more expensive and slower)
Ideas I’ve had:
- ECC memory
- CSM sku motherboard
- Hugely overkill power supply, or even dual redundant PSUs
- RAID M.2 boot drives
- All air cooled
What do you all think? If you were to spec out a (realistic) ultra-reliable PC what parts would you use and why?
P.S. I’m looking less for specific recommendations as I am for general ideas, which is why I didn’t specify the use case or budget. I’m more interested in the concept and if it’s feasible.
Hardware raid is always a significant failure point unless you have enough drives to do higher raids and good striping and redundancy, which you can’t do with 2 drives.
Software raid-like solutions like the ZFS filesystem gives you similar benefits with less downsides and instability.
A simple software drive mirror with a seperate periodic backup drives gives more stability than raid 0 or 1 ever would.
This chase for hardware “stability” in a non-server setting is mostly futile though. Probably >99% of crashes and system instability is due to software. Drivers, Windows updates, games, quality of life software, discord, Windows file system explorer bugs, upgrading to windows 11, any and all shitty RGB software, etc… will all crash themselves or your system 100 times before a hardware failure will ever crash your system or cause you to lose data.