Excuse my imprecise use of terminology. I'd expect RAM *bandwidth to be far and away the limiting factor in memtest's ability run fast, since sequential reads and writes to RAM such as I assume memtest use accrue negligable sigma latency and CPU time compared with the cost of repeatedly hitting RAM for the reads and writes.

I assumed that that was what you meant, but you CAN control the latency and timings as well. Some motherboards let you go absolutely crazy with the number of timings you can control, actually.

Indeed, so I've heard, although I've never personally tried to tune my latency and timings for fear of locking things up irreparably.

Well, a CMOS clear will usually sort it all back out, but I don't mess with timings because it usually doesn't matter.

But for example, here are some shots of what my motherboard lets me specify:
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIyNDIyMTcwMkZzdWFSeG40SllfMl81X2wuZ2lm
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIyNDIyMTcwMkZzdWFSeG40SllfMl82X2wuZ2lm
http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIyNDIyMTcwMkZzdWFSeG40SllfMl83X2wuZ2lm

I like how that first screenshot shows a voltage of 2.46V when the warning right above it says above 1.65V could cause permanent damage.

Ok so I tired another HDD and it still BSOD'd during the install so I'm back to square one. I'll try my other ram chips and see what happens but if that also fails the only thing left would be the processor. I'm doubtful that's the issue and I'm not really sure how I'd test it.

EDIT: Seriously what does the windows installer do that 19hr's of memtest86 doesn't error and yet the install fails on those ram chips...

I put in my old Corsair XMMS2 chips that I bought with my computer in the first place and the install took. I guess I'll be buying a set of 2x1GB chips for my mom's desktop now since I had put my old ones in there.

Wow, that's the strangest thing ever. I'm glad you've finally (hopefully) narrowed it down and solved this.

memtest isn't foolproof. I've seen bad RAM pass memtest before.

A simple re-seat also goes a long way.

Yeah I tried a re-seat as well, not to mention they were just installed a day or two ago since this Mobo is new under warranty(even though it seems it wasn't the issue).

Indeed, although we thought it would have been. Interesting enough, I noticed that Andy Janata had almost the exact same issue, where some RAM passed memtest but would make things crash often.

I was upgrading a laptop with a second stick of RAM. It would reliably BSOD a couple of minutes after booting and logging into Windows with the new stick in slot B, and BSOD before reaching the login screen if the new stick was the only one in the machine. However, Memtest couldn't find any problems with it. I haven't put much faith in the software since then!

I'm surprised to hear three separate instances of this in as many days; I had always put a lot of faith in memtest as a dependable go/no-go on sticks of RAM. :/ I wonder if it would be possible for the developers to figure out what they're missing, or if it would be hard to replicate.