HPE ProLiant Gen8 selection questions

[toolforger]

Hi all,

two questions here:

1. I am seeing three models (Celeron, i3, and Xeon CPUs). I am planning for a backup/archive server, no transcoding or other extra services. I believe that the Celeron is good enough for that task - is that belief well-founded?

2. HPE offers validated RAM ("SmartMemory"). It's pretty expensive, but they promise additional monitoring capabilities, which could be pretty valuable. Question here is whether it's giving that extra value in practice - did anybody ever get an alarm beyond the standard ECC alarms?
RAM manual on https://static.digitecgalaxus.ch/Files/2/0/4/8/4/4/5/563ac446-85a1-4ee1-a172-c0cc820e1b33.pdf , page 1, last sentence above image:

And because the memory is authenticated, extended memory performance features can be enabled through the system ROM.

User Guide on https://media.dustin.eu/media/211509/proliant-microserver-gen8.pdf , page 52, paragraph 'HP SmartMemory' (irrelevant sections snipped):

HP SmartMemory [...] authenticates and unlocks certain features available only on HP Qualified memory and verifies whether installed memory has passed HP qualification and test processes. Qualified memory is performance-tuned for HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers[...].
Certain performance features are unique with HP SmartMemory. The industry supports UDIMM at 2 DIMMs per channel at 1066 MT/s. HP SmartMemory supports 2 DIMMs per channel at 1333 MT/s, or 25% greater bandwidth.

If performance is good enough, that 25% speed-up seems irrelevant; I'm wondering what, if anything, it is doing for reliability.