I have a machine as listed in my sig. I posted a bit here around the time I put it together. The SSD was added some time later. It's always had problems with sporadic freezing. I did find that my original RAM would show a small number of errors in overnight memtest sessions, so I RMAd my first 8gb and brought another 8gb (partly so I wouldn't be without while waiting for the replacement)... pretty sure all 16gb test clean now (although I haven't actually run memtest for a while, so it might be worth a go). It feels like it might be a bit worse now than it had been for a while; might just be that I'm using this machine a bit more frequently (I get more peace in the study where this is than I do in the living room ). The freezing is not associated with high load etc, although it does often seem to be fairly soon after powering on or waking from sleep. It sometimes happens during POST time. I've sometimes seen it stop during POST for several minutes before carrying on as normal. I only realised this once I started trying to test fairly systematically - obviously normally if the thing hasn't advanced through POST after 30 secs or so I assume it's not going anywhere and just restart it. I thought I'd done as much as I could to test the machine with as minimal hardware as possible to eliminate all but the bare MB / CPU / HDD / PSU, all of which have been put through burn-in tests. I came to the conclusion that the motherboard was the only likely culprit, so went to the trouble of disassembling everything and returning the MB to Scan, who tested but couldn't reproduce my problem - so I still have the original MB. I've been putting up with it, but would rather like to have a machine that runs reliably (I occasionally set up computer based art installations and the like: obviously wouldn't dream of using a machine that behaves like this, but would if I could trust it). I suppose it could be the PSU that was the problem all along. I could probably scrounge around for another PSU to test with. I still suspect that the problem is the MB and that Scan just didn't test enough to see the problem. It's an irritating thing to diagnose as it's so sporadic. Not sure how much anyone can help, but all thoughts appreciated. I run Win8 FWIW; was on 7 previously for a while and it's been much the same with both.
Worth a thought... I have a cheapo front panel card reader thing that I *think* I eliminated (must be two years since I was properly testing, so can't exactly remember - should check if I made notes). Worth taking that as well as the case USB header out I suppose.
So I've disconnected the front panel card reader thing. Thought it seemed better, but I did experience a crash this morning. Somewhat different to the more common freeze; my second screen went blank as well as the computer freezing. I can remember this happening in the past, maybe just once or twice. Don't think it happened 'till recently. I do have both screens attached to the GPU - one reason for getting this MB originally was that nVidia drivers would never idle properly when driving multiple displays, but Z68 allows connecting one via integrated, which is the way I used to run it. Cheers edit: I do have an external drive connected in an eSATA caddy ATM, so could try pulling that for a while.
I can't seem to get this machine to boot from USB since updating to UEFI BIOS / installing Windows 8. I can't see any options related to this in the BIOS (I mean, I can change the boot order, but there's nothing related to allowing unsigned OSes). There is a new version on the Gigabyte website, but that's a beta and I don't feel like installing a beta BIOS on my machine just now. I might at some point try reflashing the last non-UEFI BIOS. Slight nuisance.
