[mjsanchez]

I'm at the end of everything I can possibly do to troubleshoot this.

1. I've tested the memory multiple times, passed.
2. Tested the hard drive multiple times, passed.
3. Tested voltage on PSU, everything good.
4. Inspected motherboard for physical damage.
5. Wiped entire drive clean with DoD standard and fresh OS install
6. Stress tested CPU*

* I did get errors from the CPU test so I went back to stock settings from my OC. I tested the CPU again and it ran a few cycles with no errors but when I woke up, my PC had crashed with some kind of error saying that Windows could not read from the hard drive?

SMART scan shows drive at 55% health.

What I can't figure out is the wide range of problems this computer has had. At first, it might freeze up only sometimes during graphic intensive operations, but everything ran very slowly. I tried clearing out caches and the recycle bin, doing some registry and program maintenance, scanning for viruses, and defragging my hard drive. That seemed to only make the problem worse as then opening drives and folders in explorer would make for long delays and sort of mini freezes. Eventually after one crash, windows lost the boot record, which was irreparable. I had to reinstall windows, but the problems persisted. Soon enough, I couldn't play games anymore without the machine acting up a couple minutes into gameplay. The graphics would begin artifacting almost immediately, sometimes with a freeze that alt-tab would fix, only to freeze up again less than a minute later.

The reason I can't figure this out is because the artifacting sounds like a memory problem, but scans reveal no faults. The read disk failures sound like a HD problem, but can't find bad sectors. The freezes sound like possibly a temperature problem, but the highest temperature I was able to stress my CPU to was 62 degrees, with idling being between 35 and 40.

The only thing I can conclude is that I have a bad mobo. Which wouldn't be surprising since I had a hell of time getting a good one from eVGA that wasn't practically DOA. (The first two mobos would not post with either set of memory I had.) Maybe the DIMMS are bad? I've had a lot of problems with this board, so I'm not sure what to conclude. If I could say for sure that it's JUST the board that's bad, I'd just buy a new one. But if I can't nail down one thing, I'd rather just go with a newer CPU (i5) which would force me to also upgrade my mobo and memory. That is, however, an expensive solution.

Specs:

eVGA 680i SLI
Intel Core 2 Duo e6600
Dual Channel Corsair TWIN2X 1024mb x 2 PC28500
Seagate Barracuda 320gb SATA
eVGA nVidia 8800 GTX

Help