Okay. I think I'm going to do a bit of an upgrade before I go off to school, but I have a quick question.

I have 1GB of Crucial DDR PC2700 RAM right now. I'm looking at a P4 3.0E. Will there be any particularly bad performance issues due to me having the slower, non PC3200 RAM? I mean, I'm aware that it will run, but will it be considerably gimped compared to what it could be, or is it something that would only be noticed in benchmarks?

Thanks in advance.

I'm willing to bet you would only really see the difference in benchmarks. Poor, but similar example, I used to have a system that was an 800mhz (133 bus) P3 with 128mb of RAM (PC100). When I tossed it and upped to my AMD rig, a few weeks later another couple of buddies of mine cobbled together a new PC from the Mobo + Proc with PC133 RAM instead. The rig performed a little slower in games, but we attribute that to a 4800rpm hard drive.

I doubt you would see a real big improvement if you were syncing the buses. Maybe a few seconds faster in the most read/write intensive things that you could imagine, but it wouldn't be that big of one. At least I don't think, espcecially with that much RAM.