i'm still getting more frequent lock ups leading to hard shutdowns than i should. i don't know what it is that's causing them, but i'm guessing it's ram related. any way to tell if my ram settings are too tight/aggressive? i'm not overclocking anything just running at rated specs.

thanks.

memtest your ram for 8+ passes then do orthosx2 blend for 8 hours. If those pass, you'd be fine.

memtest is just what's in bios right? i can do that for 8 runs and see what happens. maybe a stupid question, but is there a way to see those results other than watching as they run through over and over again and watching for how many times it has run or if/when there is any hardware problem?

what is this other beast you speak of?

thanks.

No, that's called POST (power-on self test) which does a quick test on everything. Get this:

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

Unless you're talking about Biostar T-Force which has built-in memtest program. It runs by itself and does its thing. Let it do 8+ passes. If it fails, your pc may have faulty ram or wrong bios settings.

wow, awesome link. which should i download and use? is this as difficult as a bios flash? the file names seem similar and i've avoided doing that this past week ( though they just released a new bios) because i've heard i can ruin my motherboard doing it wrong.

can i just download any of these to my desktop and run them?

thanks.

NO, it's not for flashing bios. It's a program that runs in a text screen. The floppy version is the easiet and it will unzip to a floppy disk auto. The other iso's must be burned to a dvd/cd as image. Not file (won't boot).