Something is wrong with my new build, could use help alienating the problem

[Viper87227]

The build in question is the first one in my sig (for those w/ them disabled: 2500k, MSI Z68A-GD55 G3, G.Skill Sniper 1600mhz, 560 Ti). I just put this system together a week ago. The CPU, board, and video card are new parts. The only parts carried over were hard drives and PSU. From the get go, everything has been horribly unstable. It seemed OK for the first day or two, but after that I started getting random lockups and BSOD's. I was hoping it was just a bad OS install, so I decided to start over and do a fresh load of W764. I got errors the first 3 attemps to install. Fourth attempt started ok, then got a BSOD when the system rebooted to finish installation. Rebooted again, installation finished, and seemed ok. Installed chipset drivers and rebooted, and on the next boot, I had to sit through four BSOD before it would reboot.

BSOD #1 was for Memory Managment. BSOD #2 was System Service Exception. BSOD #3 was page fault in nonpaged area. The fourth one rebooted before I caught it. After that, it rebooted again as if nothing was wrong. Just installed Nvidia drivers and here I am.

Looking around for these three different BSOD's seems to take me in no specific direction that I can observe. The only parts I am able to swap out is a different set of ram, which did not aleviate my problems. I tried that before reinstalling windows, so maybe that installed was already to messed up for that to make a difference. I am going to try swapping ram again, but I'm looking for some other possible leads in the mean time... if anyone has any suggestions i'd love to hear them.

I'm going to give Memtest86 a go tonight and see how that does. If that passes, anything I can use to specifically work the CPU? Prime95 I assume, but is there a specific setup I should use to stain the CPU without putting load on anything else? What about the motherboard, any way to diagnose if thats the problem?

Any ideas would be appreciated. Anything I can look for in event viewer that may shed some light? I've been doing this for years, never quite had a ghost in my system like this. Generally builds seem to go painless when its all new parts, but thats not so this time.

EDIT: Jumped the gun I guess. Memtest went apeshit. Swapped another set of ram, and it was happy as a clam. So i'm guessing the last time I swapped ram, my OS install was to fubar by then for that to stop my stability problems.

 

[Dangman]

Yeah defective memory can corrupt an OS install to the point of instability. Once you RMA that RAM and get the replacements, reinstall your OS.