How much is ECC performance different than non-parity ram?

[TravisW111]

Well I decided to buy a crucial pc 133 256 meg, cas 2. Well it turns out that the ECC was about $4 cheaper than the non-parity, and I thought that ECC would be better, so I bought it. Well i've been hearing a lot about how ECC won't perform as well as non-parity ram, so I thought I would ask. Also, does it have any random slow-downs or anything like that? I just might consider returning it for the non-parity if theres a significant difference.

 

[Rand]

ECC SDRAM is slightly more reliable then regular SDRAM, it's generally used in servers where data reliability is of the utmost importance. ECC SDRAM is usually about 5% slower then non-ECC SDRAM in terms of pure memory bandwidth, it has little to no effect on latency.
If you wish you can disable ECC in the BIOS and it will act exactly as would regular non-ECC SDRAM. Some motherboards arent capable of utilizing ECC SDRAM and those would treat it as regular non-ECC SDRAM.