There are certainly different levels of ECC support and features, it's not as simple as either/or.
And any such feature must be supported on every level in order for it to work, so in most cases the ECC memory itself, CPU memory controller, BIOS and OS(!). If one is lacking the desired support, the entire feature is just a placebo. And even though most CPU memory controllers have support technically, if they don't support it officially, they are probably not verified, so it might not offer the protection that you want, so a BIOS "enabling" ECC on an unverified CPU might not be a good idea.
I wish I had time to do a deep-dive into researching what ECC levels are supported on various mainstream and workstation platforms, and do real validation on it, not just trust marketing gimmicks.
But even moreso, get some real answer to find out when ECC actually makes a real world difference. Even though I understand well how it works, I still couldn't give a clear answer to where to draw the line on having it or not. Clearly, mission critical servers should have it, but should your home "workstation" have it?
And I'm not primarily worried about crashes. I mostly use Linux, and system crashes and reboots are hardly in my vocabulary. I'm more worried about undetected memory corruption leading to corrupted files/data. When applications are running for months, what are the likelihood of corrupted data?
