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.
A quality power supply plus a good UPS will take care of any power-related instability. Other than that, buy reputable brands from reputable sellers, and you should be fine.
IMHO, "ultra-reliability" is kind of a trap. You can spend a lot more money on enterprise-class hardware to get another 0.01% uptime.
Your situation may be different than most consumers, so I hesitate to speak in absolutes, but for the vast majority of people, software configuration issues are going to be the cause of instability by orders of magnitude over hardware.
I work in distributed systems with 5 9s of reliability (99.999% uptime) and we often say every 9 costs you an extra 0.