what kind of ram do i need? 533 or 677

im upgradeing to ddr2 ram and im not sure what i need. I have a p4 3ghz 533 fsb. I ordered a gig of 677 off of new egg but im not really sure if thats what i need or it will screw up my computer

First you need a Welcome to the Computer Forum! Official Welcome Thread along with the usual reminder to new members to be familiar with the Forum Rules

For anyone to answer your question you will have to provide the brand and model of the main board you will be installing the memory onto. The specifications of the board itself will show the fastest memory it supports as well as showing if it can run a slower memory. Many new boards that run 533mhz will not support DDR2 667 memory. Others run 533, 667, and 800mhz memory with the 800 being the fastest supported.

well my motherboard supports both of those but i guess my real question was does the processor effect what i can use?

Well if your motherboard can support it then all should be good.

Your processor doesnt really make that much of a difference except for the fact that if you have a really slow processor then your better off getting a new one instead of more ram.

Your processor isnt that flash, and i would recommend getting a new one in the future. But the cpu shouldnt comprimise the ram's performance

thanks a lot for your help. Yea i know my processor isnt the greatest but it does what i need it too and when the core 2 duos come down in price, i will upgrade to that and i made sure that i got a motherboard that supports it.

Glad I could help. Just out of interest, how much did you buy the ram for> cos i am needing some more ram too so i need some idea of pricing

i paid $60 for 1 Dimm of a gig of corsare ram. www.newegg.com

The link there just shows a page full of mixed items and not the product page for the memory you ordered. You should have ordered a pair of the same in order to see the benefit of enabling the dual channel feature on the board itself for the performance gain there. Plus the additional memory often will see improved results in both gaming and running large programs. Vista likes the 2gb of ram here.

yea well im sort of broke otherwise i would have gotten 2 of em to enable dual channel but i will in time. And oh yea, F**K VISTA. Vista takes up way to much resources. Because of my hatred for vista, i am now starting to use linux.

That's seems odd since you barely see any cpu activity besides the spike when the screen is captured with the Vista taskmanager resource meter seen. Besides the initial wait for sound drivers and Vista's now lack of support for EAX and Direct3D sound you can still use the EAX console and the resources used when idle are not above average even for XP.