i just got one of those athlon xp 1700+ tbred b with the jiuhb stepping and im planning on getting an asus a7n8x (non deluxe) to go with it. Would i be wasting the board if didnt use the dual channel memory and only used 1 stick of pc2700 ram? what if i used 2 lower end sticks of ram, would i still be able to use the tbred b to almost its full potential or even close? thanks in advance...ive been posting SO many questions here lately, so if you recognized me and are getting sick a me, my bad

Like, what if i just got ONE stick of samsung pc3200? or even a lil lower to like a kingmax pc2700??

No matter what you get, you have to run your system in synchronous mode to get the most out of it. So if you are running stock 133, you could get away with low latency DDR266, if you plan on overclocking, then you would go with low latency DDR333 or DDR400. My system is a A7N8X Deluxe with an XP 2400+ and Corsair TwinX 512MB PC3200LL(DDR400). At first I was running the stock 133 FSB and I had the ram pumped up to 200, very disapointed. Then I dropped the ram to 133 to run it synchronous and boom I got a big performance increase. Now I am running the ram/FSB at 166 with a multiplier of 13 and the system is rock solid. So if I was you and I wasn't planning on overclocking, I would get a pair of high quality, low latency PC2100 sticks. In all honesty though, I am yet to see a major performance increase from dual DDR so the choice is yours if you want to go with one stick of faster RAM.

i don't know much about dual channel ddr, but here is what i think is a pretty good guess.....i read somewhere that the major advantage of dual channel is if your mobo has on-board video...for example: you got channel #1 for video and channel #2 for system and i would say at the minimum of 2 sticks of 256 i do know this for a fact....check your revision of the A7N8X mobo and flash the latest bios 1004...there's 2 categories of revision ( 2.0 and sub 2.0 aka 1.04 & 1.06) this 1004 bios fixes a few things, one is that when you POST on bootup,it will tell you if you're in dual or single channel mode

my dual channel ram never worked on my asus a7n8x deluxe

I never get any "Dual Channel mode" or "Single Channel mode" string on POST screen. I updated to C1005 but shouldn't I still get the Single / Dual Channel message? I don't get any RAM or hard drive info when booting. Actually, I did get RAM / hard drive info on the first boot right after updating to C1005. But then I had to go into the BIOS to set my external clock speed and the next time I booted I didn't get any RAM / hard drive info. I kept getting SATA RAID stuff coming up, but since I don't use it, I set the SATA jumper on the motherboard to off. This stopped the RAID message from coming up, but I still don't get any RAM / hard drive info. Any ideas?