YE HAR
Got there in the end but what a struggle
. After the first reinstall of windows I updated the drivers, but I was still having problems with it crashing and not passing a stress test. So another re-install of windows was performed keeping apps and files , well we'd come too far to give it all up, but I was thinking about a clean install
. Unfortunately, that just made it worse again, checked the event log for clues and we were back to the graphics card causing the issue. Investigation showed that the reinstall of windows installed an older driver, soon sorted that out, but still had the crashing issue. After a lot of Googling and trial and error it turned out that BIOS did not take the right settings from the RAM memory I had bought. Entered the numbers manually and hey presto a stable PC
.
Still not entirely happy that the memory is running as fast as it should or could, so I will do a bit more tweaking in the bios to see what can be achieved.
I've upgraded and swapped most bits in a PC before but never built a whole new one. It was a very interesting exercise and well worth the effort. Now if I can just find an i7-990X at sensible price
although I'm tempted to have a go with an Intel Zeon CPU which are almost as cheap as chips, even for the sporty ones
