New system problems... help!

Hi everyone, thanks for taking a look at my post.

I recently built a system with the following components:


EVGA 790i Ultra motherboard
Corsair 2 x 2GB 1333 RAM
Seagate 500GB SATA hard drive
EVGA 9800 GX2 graphics card
Intel Q9450 processor
Corsair 750W power supply
An older IDE DVD burner from LG

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit

After building the system I've been experiencing a pretty annoying problem - seemingly at random the system will lock. Any sound that was playing at the time will buzz and there is zero responsiveness without restarting the entire system. It does this during games, music, surfing the internet, writing this post, etc - anything. Sometimes it happens within 6 seconds of boot up, sometimes 6 hours after boot up, and sometimes somewhere between. I can't replicate the error but it happens at least twice a day using the PC.

Some other information:

I have installed all the latest drivers that I could find for all the components, however I have not found a straight-up BIOS update for my motherboard - do the latest motherboard drivers from EVGA actually contain the latest BIOS?

The memory voltage specified by Corsair is 1.7V, but the most voltage I can give the RAM is 1.6V otherwise I get blue screens on bootup.

I disabled native command queueing on my hard drive reading that that solved this problem for someone on another forum.




I would really like to hear from anyone who has experienced this problem and successfully solved it! This is driving me crazy and I am at a loss as to what to do now! Is it hardware or is Vista 64 just prone to this sort of thing? Any input is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!