well, i just got my new computer this week and was wondering about the RAM slots on the the a7n8x (and most other mobos at that) in order to take advantage of dual ddr, you need 2 RAM sticks, but does it matter which slots you put them in? the a7n8x has 3 slots, but two of them are right next to each other, and the 3rd is a little bit further away. i've currently got a stick in one of the paired slots, and the other in the slot further away. how do i tell if dual ddr is functioning properly?

Put the ram in slots 1&2 or 1&3, slot one being the closest to the CPU. You can run Sandra memory test and verify that using slots 2&3 is a tiny bit slower when not in dual channel mode. The reason for so little improvement is the CPU is the bottleneck and is almost as fast as single channel already. Dual channel is really for benefit of the IGP (integrated GF4 MX graphics) version of the mobo that shares the system RAM to GPU as video RAM.