RAM: BRAND > PERFORMANCE

Im thinking of upgrading my current Ram situation
i currently have
512MB DDR 2700 (333) CAS 2.5 Mushkin Enhanced

now iv got a NF7-S mobo.

im thinking going 1GB Dual channel DDR 3200
I need to know the best brand to get.
I know that "corsair" is apparently the best. bust im not sure of that myself. if anybody has a better brand they know of post it.
also if you clould expllain how dual channel works.
thankx .

Corsair XMS, Kinston HyperX, Mushkin 222 special, OCZ enhanced latency. All are good, and within a small fraction of the same performance. Look on price and tight timings (I've heard good things about the 222special, and I have personally good experience with some OCZ Enhanced latency). You really can't go wrong with any of them.
If you're feeling daring, you could try going on Ebay to find some ram with the BH5 memory chips, esp if you want to overclock, but if you do that, caveat emptor.
Dual channel means that the bandwidth from the two sticks is combined, which gives better performance. Instead of one 1gb block of ram with 1 way in and out (single channel), it acts sort of like 2 512 mb blocks that both can be read at the same time (dual channel)

How much of a performance difference will you see in real world settings? When did the price of RAM shoot up? I have one stick of 512 PC2700 in my B7NCD. If I stick in another stick of 512 PC2700 will it run in dual channel? Is that fucntion just built into the RAM/Mobo or does it have to be configured?

I haven't benchmarked w/ single vs dual channel. I've seen claimed increases of a few hundred 3dmarks in 3dm2k1. The performance increase depends on the application, and how much it uses memory bandwidth. Overall, the increase is small, but can be noticeable. Make sure your mobo supports dual channel RAM, and which slots it has to be in (probably 1&3). You may also have to enable it in bios.
Overall, I don't think I would buy another stick just to run dual channel, I would buy the other stick because there is a pretty good performance gain in moving up from 512 mb to 1 gb, and dual channel operation would be an additional bonus.

Thanks Dave. I did a little more research....

The M7NCD Pro supports dual channel. The M7NCD doesn't.

No problem. One additional note for AMD's: They don't tend to get as much out of dual channel as the P4. A good single channel will be about the same. I'd still get the RAM, if you were considering it.