Carl, OK, you may have me on this point. At the time I built this machine I was in a new home without the proper setup, but I took what I thought were necessary precautions. I put the system together on a glass surface with the board placed on the anti-static pad that comes with it and tried to discharge any static from myself by touching the metal legs of the table before handling the parts. At the time I thought this would have been enough, but given these components you may be right. I also ran memtest since your suggestion, and it did not show any errors. The only issue I had with the test is that it seemed to not test ECC, even after I selected the options to do so. Any suggestions? Thanks again Stuart
The key symptoms I'm using to arrive at my diagnosis are:
1. Failure to stumble or fall completely over on cold boot. That is the most vulnerable time for a system with a failing, undersized or marginal power supply.
2. The system freezes are truly random and are leaving no clues in the logs. This is certainly a suddenly fatal, hardware based error. These are the hallmarks of a memory problem.
3. The system can be encouraged to freeze by loading it down with an I/O intensive task, like a (buffered) disk to disk transfer... probably one of the best in-situ memory stress tests available, next to something graphics intensive.
BTW, did you take basic ESD precautions when installing the modules?
- Carl