Constant Crashes On New PC

[gavco98uk]

hey guys, after using pre-built PCs for more than 15 years, I finally decided to give building my own a shot - and its turning out to be a disaster!

I installed Windows7 RC1 to give that a shot, and was receiving frequent crashes, making the system unusable. I reverted to XP64bit, and its even worse - it bluescreens constantly, with various errors!

I just tried running memtest, and it failed spectacularly - I have 2x 2Gb and both are throwing up hundreds of errors in the check.

Are both memory sticks really blown, or have I set something wrong somewhere? What am I missing?

System specs:
Gigabyte P31-ES3G DDR2 1066 Motherboard
Intel Quad Core Q9400 2.66ghz 1333FSB
2x 2GB Corsair DDR2 1066 PC2-8500
Asus nVidia GTX275
Coolermaster RealPower M 700w power supply.

Any suggestions on what to try next?

 

[scudst0rm]

Go into your bios and make sure the ram settings (speed, timing, voltage) match what is advertised. If they do and your ram is still blowing clunks then I'd say RMA. If you really want to get some life out of the ram you could revert it to PC6400, loosen the timings, or up the voltage. But it really should be running as advertised.

 

[scudst0rm]

BTW don't get discouraged by having a bad first build. You'll learn alot more then if your build runs flawlessly on the first try.