Board on its way back. Here you go - what does the jury reckon on this:-
"Our repair team say that upon inspection the BIOS was found to have been updated wrongly to a different version by a 3rd party that had scrambled data on it which required it to be reset to the latest official version for this model of board"
Hmm?? All I had done was reset boot order and fan control. It worked from late Sep through Oct into early Nov with just a few 'lock-ups' (which I dutifully ignored...) until the 'crash' when I could not access the BIOS. I had, of course, 'done' the CMOS battery and cleared the BIOS during the troubleshooting, but 'corrupting' it???? No electrical storms etc.
Who is the '3rd party'? Am I being fobbed off here? I detect a groundswell on various fora against Gigabyte mobos. Any more opinions here like lfaj's?
SuperG3 - Google seems to support your comment on RAM sticks, but I'm sure I had read (?somewhere?) to try the mobo with RAM out.