Systems with "consumer amounts of RAM" are often run with what you might call "consumer amounts of sysadmin knowledge" and not notice the errors.

One time I took a working workstation from my home to my parents' home to give them. When I booted it up it gave a lot of strange kernel errors which I googled and discovered were reports of ECC correction. I reseated all DIMMs and it was fine. If that gave errors a few times a year instead of thousands of times on the first boot I wouldn't have noticed.