> It's nearly impossible to find a desktop CPU that supports ECC ram now

That's not correct. All 6th Gen Core i3 have ECC support, and the 7th Gen Core i3 that have 'E' in the product name support ECC:

http://ark.intel.com/products/97130/Intel-Core-i3-7101E-Proc...

To be fair i3 being the lower end offering with just 2 cores isn't really competing against any of the server products Intel offers.

Quad (and more) core i5 and i7 that do have near-equivalent Xeon parts do have ECC disabled.

An i3 is very often a perfect chip for a NAS.

Person above is running a NAS; seems the i3 would be perfect.

Sorry, maybe not a NAS but my point stands. Almost any chip that has a server equivalent either has ECC disabled in the chip or the motherboard chipset. This was never the case until some years ago, and the only example I've ever found of Intel removing a feature from their desktop chips exclusively. I don't see any other reason for this except to force people to buy Xeons for their servers

If you going the workstation route then 2011 Xeon CPU's do support ECC and are cheaper than Desktop HEDT parts.

Getting an Intel Xeon E3 for socket 1151 isn't particularly hard or expensive either.

Yeah have fun buying the motherboard that supports it. The whole thing reeks of bullshit

I personally tested a number of low end haswell pentiums and i3s and they support ECC. I have a 4310T paired with a C222 server board for my ZFS NAS.

Xeon E3's with ECC are rather similar, and even sometimes cheaper than the i5/i7 equiv. They are the same die after all.