As some of you who hang out on IRC may know my Desktop has been rather unstable lately. I've been trying to narrow down the cause but have so far been unable to do so. Here is what I know so far.

1)Its not the ram, memtest86 made it through 2 complete passes before I killed it.

2)The graphics card is also very new, less than a week old.

3)The errors seem to point to hardware but no specific par, device or bus seems to fail twice in a row. I've had USB devices suddenly lose power. a PS/2 keyboard have its status lights start flashing and the system stop responding, random drivers in windows cause BSOD's.

4)The system sometimes hangs durring post at Initializing USB devices but I could never pinpoint a single USB device that could be causeing that.

I was going to try reflashing the bios to see if my last flash somhow got corrupted. After that I am totally out of ideas.[/list]

Could be dirty power, which could cause seemingly random stability problems. Might also be some failure on the motherboard, which would be much harder to pin down conclusively without trying all your other parts on some other mobo.

So would your vote be then to try a newer PSU and see if it persists? I do have it hooked up through my UPS so surges and such shouldn't be an issue.

Reformat and reinstall.

Also, *new* hardware is more likely the problem than *old* hardware. So your video card is absolutely not off the hook simply because it's new, but given that you are having USB and PS/2 problems as well, it isn't the video card (which would only result in graphical glitches or BSODs from the video driver)

But both windows and linux are having issues, thats why I didn't think it was an install issue, I can try a reinstall but that doesn't seem to be the issue.

As to the new hardware thing, I was having issues before I got the new video card.

I'm going to opine that it's either a motherboard issue or a PSU issue. Do you have a spare PSU that you could try to narrow it down to possibly PSU or definitely motherboard?

I could try the PSU in my mom's desktop, but its a dell and thus the cable lengths may be an issue as they often build custom make the cableing to just fit.

It might also have insufficient PCI-e power for your new graphics cards, but I think it's at least worth a try.

Nah, Her machine was a higher end Dell XPS gaming/Media Center rig, it should have plenty of power.

They still use PSUs that are complete crap and that barely have enough power to drive the system itself.

Aight, good stuff; I look forward to hearing the results of your experiment, then.

Well I broke down and actually took my comp to the local computer place where they tested my PSU, according to their tester its fine, so its either my Mobo, or somehow my Linux and Windows installs got hosed at the same time. I vote mobo. Since it has a 3 year warrentty I'll be calling Asus about it this afternoon.

Edit: so just for the hell if it I was gonna run an fdisk on my linux partition from a liveCD, well the kernel on the liveCD oops'd and rebooted as well, so I vote my installs are not hosed and my Mobo really is the issue.

Yay, that sounds like a good plan of action. Cooper had one of those testers, but I've never personally had one.

Well the ASUS tech support people were real nice and I was able to get the RMA setup real easily. Thanks to my OCD of keeping everything from when I built my comp I'll just have to go through that box to find the CPU socket cover so I can ship it out this weekend. They emailed me all the info right away and so far this has been rather painless, though I'm not looking forward to the shipping costs of sending the package to CA all the way from WI.

That's a pain, but I hope that it works out. Since your PSU checked out, your RAM seems unmolested, and your GPU is new (and the same things happened with your old GPU), what are you going to do if the new mobo shows the same issue? Is the CPU a possible culprit?

Well I've never run the CPU at higher than the stock voltage, though it was overclocked for a bit, I never had to touch voltages, only FSB speeds.

Yeah, but it still could have been defective straight from the manufacturer, and have a bad transistor or three that occasionally cause trouble (or recently went bad due to high temperatures, or being of original poor quality, or any of myriad other reasons).

Well if it is the CPU I'd say this is much worse than fdiv when it comes to failing to make a decent CPU on intel's part.

Ah yes, the infamous FDIV bug. :S Good luck.

I was going to suggest updating the motherboard drivers, but it looks like you've already sent in for a replacement.

There seems to be a common issue with USB devices on Vista and 7, due to outdated motherboard drivers. The issue would sometimes cause the system to experience BSoD crashes when a USB device was plugged into the system or removed.