

I switched to ECC only for my home server over 10 years ago after a silent ram error corrupted some data on my raid drives. I didn’t realize there was a problem until I went to look at an old photo and it was corrupted.
“8 percent of the DIMMs saw correctable error per year”
And this was from 20 years ago when memory density was much less so the chance of an error was lower.
It depends on how old. My Xeons are e-2224G. They’re 14nm coffee lake. They are rated at 71Watts but as I said only use 15w streaming 4k.
They’re $190 on eBay with 16gb ram and 256 GB SSD.
A 16 GB Pi5 is $130 just for the motherboard. You still need storage, case and power supply.